« 


apt*  °  ^ 

PRINCETON,  N.  J. 


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5//^. 


BL  263  .D78  1884 

Drury,  John  Benjamin,  1838- 

1909. 
Truths  and  untruths  of 

evolution 


WIS 


&. 


Ufbtier  ILccturcs,  1883 


TRUTHS  AND  UNTRUTHS 


OF  EVOLUTION 


BY 


JOHN  B.  DRURY,  D.  D. 


New  York 
ANSON  D.  F.  RANDOLPH  &  COMPANY 

900    BROADWAY,    COR.    20th    STREET 


Copyright,  1884, 
By  Anson  D.  F.  Randolph  &  Co. 


ST.  JOHNLAND  PRINTED    BY 

STEREOTYPE    FOUNDRY,  EDWARD     O.    JENKINS, 

SUFFOLK    CO.,    N.    Y.  20    NORTH    WILLIAM    ST.,    N.   Y. 


PREFACE 


The  lectures  constituting  the  present  volume 
were  delivered  in  April,  1883,  before  the  students 
of  the  Theological  Seminary  and  Rutgers  Col- 
lege, at  New  Brunswick.  When  chosen  to  lecture 
on  the  Vedder  Foundation  I  thought  I  could  not 
better  accomplish  the  object  designed,  than  to 
present  so  far  as  could  be  done  in  the  course  of 
five  lectures,  the  line  of  argument  which  had 
brought  satisfaction  to  my  own  mind  when  con- 
fronted with  the  chief  of  the  problems  presented 
by  modern  science.  In  the  discussion  I  have 
sought  to  be  just  and  fair  to  science  as  well  as  to 
religion.  As  the  reader  will  see,  instead  of  com- 
bating Evolution  as  altogether  inadmissible,  I 
concede  a  possibility  of  its  truthfulness,  and  aim 
to  show  that  the  believer  in  God  and  a  Rev- 
elation, has  nothing  to  fear  from  it  as  a  foe  to 
religion,  when  its  postulates  are  freed  from  as- 
sumptions, and  its  truths  are  separated  from 
its  untruths.  It  was  the  expressed  wish  of  the 
founder  of  the  lectureship  that  the  courses  de- 


iv  PREFACE. 

livered  should  be  published  and  thus  reach  a 
wider  audience  than  that  immediately  addressed. 
The  present  volume  is  sent  forth  in  compliance 
with  that  wish,  seconded  by  the  oinnion  of  those 
who  heard  the  lectures,  that  they  would  prove 
useful  in  clearing  up  some  of  the  difficulties 
with  which  many  honest  and  thoughtful  minds 
are  troubled  in  view  of  claims  that  are  made  in 
the  name  of  science. 

The  lectures  are  printed  as  delivered,  except 
that  an  occasional  note  has  been  appended.  They 
are  sent  forth  with  the  earnest  prayer  that  they 
may  be  helpful  in  a  period  so  full  of  questionings 
and  doubtings  as  the  present. 

J.  B.  D. 

Ghent,  N.  Y.  November,  1883. 


CONTENTS. 


LECTURE  I. 
Inteoductoky:  Evolution,  the  Hypothesis  ...        1 

LECTURE  II. 
Evolution  and  the  Earth 31 

LECTURE  III. 
Evolution  and  Man 60 

LECTURE  IT. 
Evolution  and  Civilization 89 

LECTURE   V. 
Evolution  and  the  Bible 118 


TRUTHS  AND  UNTRUTHS  OF 
EVOLUTION. 


LECTURE   FIRST. 

INTRODUCTORY:  EVOLUTION,  THE  HYPOTHESIS. 

The  scope  of  the  lectureship,  in  accordance 
with  whose  terms  I  appear  before  you,  is  de- 
fined, by  the  instrument  establishing  it,  as 
"  a  course  of  lectures  on  the  present  aspects 
of  modern  infidelity,  including  its  cause  and 
cure." 

In  coming  to  the  consideration  of  this  gen- 
eral theme,  I  am  profoundly  impressed  by  the 
fact  that  in  our  day  the  chief  and  most  formi- 
dable assault  on  our  Christian  faith  comes  from 
the  side  of  the  natural  sciences. 

Speaking  in  the  name  of  these  sciences, 
which  seek  to  usurp  to  themselves  the  very 
name  of  science,  unbelief  challenges  the  very 
fundamentals  of  religion,  and  is  insidiously 
giving  an  infidel  tone  to  modern  thought  and 
literature.  A  chief  danger  to  religion  lies  in 
this  direction.     Do  not  understand  me  by  this 


2  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

to  affirm  that  the  students  of  nature  are  pre- 
dominantly unbelievers,  and  that  natural  sci- 
ence itself  is  necessarily  materialistic,  atheistic 
or  infidel.  On  the  contrary,  it  can  be  estab- 
lished that  the  chief  contributors  to  a  true 
science  of  nature  have  ever  been  devout  Chris- 
tians, and  a  legitimate  science  is  to-day,  as 
always,  the  friend  rather  than  the  foe  of  true 
religion.  What  I  would  emphasize  is  the 
fact  that,  to-day,  natural  science  is  relied  upon 
to  furnish  to  every  school  of  antagonists  to 
religion,  such  weapons  as  they  have, — is,  in 
other  words,  both  the  arsenal  and  citadel  of 
modern  infidelity.  It  has  become  such  through 
the  growing  influence  of  the  scientific  hy- 
pothesis known  as  evolution,  and  the  fre- 
quent assumption,  that  it  has  made  untenable 
faith  in  God  and  the  Bible. 

Always  and  everywhere  the  root  of  unbe- 
lief is  the  natural  opposition  of  the  heart  to 
God  and  His  law.  The  vast  majority  of  unbe- 
lievers are  merely  inattentive  or  indifferent 
to  the  claims  of  religion, — they  neither  seek 
for  nor  give,  a  reason  for  their  unbelief.  But 
this  course  does  not  suffice  for  all,  nor  perma- 
nently for  any.  Men  cannot  escape  thought, 
and  if  questioned  by  none  else,  the  soul  must 
give  a  reason  to  itself  for  its  doubts  and  un- 
belief.    A  thoughtful  man  cannot  be  content 


OF  EVOLUTION.  3 

without  some  plausible  reason  for  not  accept- 
ing the  strong  and  seemingly  invincible  claims 
of  Christianity.  The  situation,  to-day,  is  sub- 
stantially this, — that  nearly  all  who  reject  our 
revealed  faith  and  the  religion  of  Christ  are 
depending  for  a  logical  defence  in  so  doing 
on  the  scientific  theory  of  evolution.  The 
real  battle,  therefore,  in  our  day  between  the 
Christian  faith  and  infidelity  is  waged  in  this 
field  of  thought,  and  the  issue  is  over  the  ex- 
istence of  a  personal  Deity.  Unbelief,  speak- 
ing in  the  name  of  evolution,  boldly  asks: — 
Is  God  any  longer  to  be  considered  as  a  ne- 
cessary factor  in  the  history  of  the  universe  ? 

The  questions  contended  over  within  the 
pale  of  Theism, — such  as  prophecy  and  mir- 
acles, the  credibility  and  authority  of  the 
Bible,  the  person  and  work  of  Christ, — are,  in 
this  new  phase  of  the  struggle,  relegated  to  a 
subordinate  position.  The  assailants  tacitly, 
if  not  avowedly,  concede  that  on  these  issues, 
granting  the  postulate  of  an  intelligent  per- 
sonal creator  and  governor  of  the  world,  the 
battle  has  gone  against  them. 

If  there  has  been  a  creator  and  ruler,  such 
in  His  being  and  works  as  we  have  been  ac- 
customed to  infer  from  the  evidences  of  wis- 
dom and  beneficence  so  conspicuous  in  nature, 
everything  essential  to  the  Christian  system 


4  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

is  made  both  possible  and  probable.  Kevela- 
tion  and  redemption,  providence  and  miracles 
and  prayer,  fit  so  readily  and  perfectly  into 
the  system  that  they  altogether  cease  to  be 
anomalous  or  incredible.  It  is  coming  to  be 
discerned  that  to  concede  the  possibility  of  a 
revelation  removes  the  chief  ground 'for  re- 
jecting its  contents,  that  if  there  be  such  a 
thing  as  the  supernatural,  the  position  of 
Christianity  after  centuries  of  futile  assault 
is  left  well-nigh  impregnable.  Hence  the 
cause  of  infidelity  practically  depends  on  its 
success  in  denying  God  and  the  supernatural. 

Until  recently  this  seemed  so  impracticable 
that  few  skeptics  were  willing  to  join  issue 
at  this  point.  Now,  as  has  been  said,  it  is 
the  chosen  ground  of  battle,  and  it  is  boldly 
claimed  that  the  world  and  its  inhabitants 
have  come  into  being,  and  are  what  they  are, 
through  a  process  of  unintelligent  mechanical 
evolution,  which  not  only  makes  unnecessary, 
but  actually  excludes,  the  intervention  of  any 
supra-mundane  power,  and  does  away  with 
creation  and  a  creator,  save  it  be  as  an  im- 
personal, initial  force. 

The  issue  thus  presented  by  the  infidel  cannot 
be  evaded,  and  the  believer  of  all  others  need 
have  no  wish  to  evade  it.  It  necessitates  a 
careful  examination   of  the  position   behind 


OF  EVOLUTION.  5 

which,  the  enemy  has  entrenched  himself,  and 
presents  to  ns  the  question  whether  the  use 
which  is  sought  to  be  made  of  this  latest  gen- 
eralization of  science  be  legitimate.  Perchance 
there  may  be  a  wide  difference  between  evo 
lution,  and  evolution  as  the  excuse  for  unbelief. 
At  all  events  it  will  be  timely  to  inquire  into 
the  state  of  the  question,  and  seek  to  learn 
how  much  of  truth  and  how  much  of  error  there 
may  be  in  this  hypothesis  of  science,  which 
bears  so  directly  upon  our  most  fundamental 
religious  beliefs. 

Called  therefore  as  I  am  to  discuss  "one 
of  the  present  aspects  of  modern  infidelity," 
and  viewing  the  situation  to  be  such  as  I 
have  sketched,  it  has  seemed  to  me  I  could 
not  do  better  than  examine  with  carefulness 
and  candor  the  present  state  of  the  case. 
If  I  shall  do  nothing  more  than  map  out 
the  issues,  and  exhibit  what  is  fact,  and  what 
theory  and  assumption,  in  the  postulate  so 
boldly  appropriated  by  the  unbeliever,  I  shall 
feel  my  labor  has  not  been  lost.  For  many  a 
problem,  when  its  terms  are  freed  from  ambi- 
guity and  confusion — when  it  is  once  simply 
and  correctly  stated — is  near  to  a  solution. 

I  propose  to  examine,  therefore,  as  honestly, 
dispassionately,  and  carefully,  as  is  possible, 
the  evolutionist's  hypotheses,  and  their  appli- 


6  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

cations,  accept  truth  wherever  it  is  found,  and 
eliminate,  as  far  as  it  is  discoverable,  that  which 
is  false.  My  general  topic  can  properly  be 
formulated  as,  "The  Truths  and  Untruths  of 
Evolution." 

I  am  addressing,  I  assume,  those  who  are 
with  me  believers  in  God  and  the  religion 
of  the  Bible. 

My  aim  will  be  not  so  much  to  convince  the 
unbeliever,  to  confound  or  convert  the  infidel, 
as  to  confirm  faith  and  dispel  doubt. 

If  I  may  suggest  anything  to  help  the  hon- 
est doubter,  or  relieve  the  fears  of  those  to 
whom  it  seems  that  the  very  citadel  of  our 
faith  is  in  danger,  I  shall  be  content.  As  for 
the  confirmed  skeptic,  if  the  intuitions  of  the 
soul,  and  the  witness  of  the  conscience  to  God, 
do  not  convince,  I  am  persuaded  no  amount 
of  reasoning  will  avail  to  do  it. 

What  I  submit  for  your  consideration  is  the 
fruit  of  much  careful  investigation  and  thought, 
and  though  laying  no  claim  to  originality  or 
novelty,  beyond  what  always  appertains  to 
independent  thinking,  it  will  I  trust  prove 
suggestive  and  useful  as  an  aid  in  studying 
the  present  position  and  probable  future  of  the 
evolution  hypothesis. 

It  is  sometimes  charged  that  faith  in  God 
and  Christianity  must  necessarily  incapacitate 


OF  EVOLUTION.  7 

and  unfit  one  for  the  fair  and  unbiased  treat- 
ment of  such  a  subject.  Perhaps  it  does  for 
an  unbiased  study  of  a  postulate  that  excludes 
God  and  the  supernatural,  but  not  of  any  ques- 
tion that  is  essentially  one  of  science,  as  evo- 
lution properly  and  legitimately  is.  But  aside 
from  this  it  may  well  be  doubted  if  it  is  pos- 
sible, or  desirable,  for  an  earnest  and  thoughtful 
man  to  come  to  the  examination  of  any  ques- 
tion entirely  unbiased.  However,  in  the  case 
before  us  it  will  be  conceded,  I  doubt  not, 
that  the  believer  is  no  more  unfitted  by  his 
faith,  than  the  skeptic  by  his  want  of  faith,  to 
deal  fairly  in  the  matter. 

The  scientific  spirit  ought  to  be  especially 
truth-loving,  and  dispassionate,  yet  one  can 
read  but  a  little  way  in  the  so-called  science 
of  the  day,  without  discerning  not  merely  an 
indifference  to  the  bearings  of  its  conclusions 
on  the  conception  of  God,  and  the  postulates 
of  religion,  but  an  absolute  anxiety  to  escape 
even  the  supposition  of  God,  and  a  persistent 
effort  to  magnify  the  so-called  antagonisms 
of  science  aud  religion.  This  manifests,  we 
submit,  a  bias  against,  much  less  favorable  be- 
cause harder  to  overcome,  to  the  dispassionate 
investigation  of  truth,  than  a  bias/or,  God  and 
religion:  since  the  latter  rests  on  kinds  of 
evidence  as  substantial  and  satisfying  as  the 


8  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

evidence  for  scientific  truth.  In  other  words, 
I  believe  one  is  better  equipped  for  finding 
the  truth,  who  believes,  on  the  testimony  of 
his  own  soul  and  consciousness,  and  the 
phenomena  of  mind  and  spirit,  that  there 
is  a  God,  than  one  who  ignores  every  kind 
of  truth,  save  that  discoverable  by  scientific 
induction. 

At  all  events,  it  shall  be  my  endeavor  to 
preserve  throughout  the  discussion,  at  least  as 
fair  and  honest  a  spirit,  as  those  who  appeal 
to  science  to  excuse  their  infidelity. 

Necessarily,  in  so  brief  a  course  as  this,  there 
is  time  only  for  hints  and  suggestions.  I  shall 
need  confine  myself  to  the  barest  outlines  of 
thoughts  and  arguments,  hence  I  shall  in  many 
cases,  be  able  to  no  more  than  indicate  the 
course  of  treatment  fullest  of  promise  in  the 
interest  of  truth,  and  leave  it  for  each  to  fol- 
low it  out  for  himself. 

EVOLUTION THE    HYPOTHESIS. 

Evolution  is  the  general  name  for  that  meth- 
od of  accounting  for  existing  diversity,  which 
supposes  present  complexity  to  be  the  result 
of  successive  and  gradual  modifications  of 
simpler  forms.  It  makes  the  development  of 
the  individual  from  the  germ,  by  successive 
but  closely  connected  differentiations,  to  be 


OF  EVOLUTION.  9 

the  image  and  type  of  the  genesis  of  all  ex- 
isting beings. 

One  of  its  clearest  and  ablest  expounders, 
Huxley,  defines  the  term,  when  employed  in 
biology,  "Asa  general  name  for  the  history 
of  the  steps  by  which  any  living  being  has 
acquired  the  morphological  and  the  physio- 
logical characters  which  distinguish  it."1 

He  has  applied  this  definition  both  to  the 
genesis  of  the  individual,  and  to  the  sum  of 
living  beings,  but  when  given  in  connection 
with  the  latter  the  definition  receives  an  ad- 
dition, from  which,  I  believe,  proceed  most 
of  the  untruths  discernible  in  its  applications. 
Evolution  in  this  definition  becomes  much 
more  than  the  Idstory  of  nature's  transforma- 
tions. He  says,  "  Evolution  is  the  process  by 
which  the  physical  world  and  all  things  in  it, 
whether  living  or  not  living,  have  originated 
through  the  continuous  operation  of  purely 
physical  causes  out  of  a  primitive  relatively 
formless  matter." 


•Article  "Evolution,"  Encyclopaedia  Britannica.  Our 
quotations  of  the  views  of  leading  evolutionists  are  taken 
as  far  as  possible  from  the  ninth  edition  of  the  Ency- 
clopaedia Britannica,  rather  than  from  their  published 
works,  both  as  more  convenient  and  as  embodying  the 
later  and  more  matured  opinions  of  the  advocates  of 
evolution. 


10  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

To  the  same  purport  is  the  definition  of  other 
evolutionists. 

Herbert  Spencer's  is  substantially  this: — 
"  Evolution  is  a  change  from  the  homoge- 
neous to  the  heterogeneous,  from  the  indefi- 
nite or  undetermined,  to  the  defined  or  deter- 
mined, from  the  incoherent  to  the  coherent; 
and  the  causes  of  these  changes  are  involved 
in  the  ultimate  laws  of  matter,  force  or  motion. 
The  rationale  of  which  is  a  distinctly  mechan- 
ical process." 

James  Sully,  author  of  the  article  on  "Evo- 
lution in  Philosophy"  in  the  last  edition  of 
the  Encyclopcedia  Britannica,  thus  defines  it: 
— "Evolution  includes  all  theories  respecting 
the  origin  and  order  of  the  world  which  re- 
gard the  higher  and  more  complex  forms  of 
existence  as  following  and  depending  on  the 
lower  and  simple  forms,  which  represent  the 
course  of  the  world  as  a  gradual  transition 
from  the  indeterminate  to  the  determinate, 
from  the  uniform  to  the  varied,  and  which 
assume  the  cause  of  this  process  to  be  imma- 
nent in  the  world  itself  that  is  thus  trans- 
formed." 

In  all  these  definitions  we  note  that  they 
make  evolution  not  merely  the  history  of  a 
process,  but  equally  the  complete  account  of 
its  causality. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  11 

By  the  legerdemain  of  a  definition,  other 
than  second  causes  are  barred  out.  As  Hux- 
ley expressly  says  when  speaking  of  man's 
place  in  nature,  "  He  is  now  known  to  be  the 
last  term  in  a  long  but  uninterrupted  series 
of  developments  effected  without  intervention 
of  any  but  what  are  termed  secondary  causes." 

It  is  this  limiting  of  causality  to  purely  me- 
chanical forces,  this  exclusion  of  other  causes 
than  those  immanent  in  things  themselves,  that 
has  served  so  generally  to  identify  evolution 
with  materialism.  It  is  emphasizing  this  feat- 
ure that  enables  the  infidel  to  claim  that  the 
hypothesis  of  a  personal  creator  is  no  longer 
necessary.  The  universe,  under  this  concep- 
tion, becomes  not  merely  a  mechanism  but 
a  self-evolved  and  self-evolving  one,  possess- 
ing within  itself  the  causes  of  all  its  trans- 
formations. 

It  is  true  that  Huxley  and  Spencer  and 
Sully,  would  probably  disclaim  the  intention 
to  absolutely  exclude  any  other  than  mechan- 
ical causality,  and  would  possibly  append  to 
their  expressions,  if  pressed,  the  saving  clause, 
"/.  c,  any  other  cause  that  science  knows  about." 
Indeed  Spencer  expressly  says  that  "  while  all 
phenomena  can  be  formulated  in  terms  of  mat- 
ter, motion  and  force,"  these  are,  in  the  last 
analysis,  "but  symbols  of  the  unknown  real- 


12  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

ity;"  and  escapes  with  many  others  the  logi- 
cal sequence  of  bald  materialism,  by  admit- 
ting, back  of  and  beyond  second  causes,  an 
unknown  and  unknowable  potentiality.  So 
long  however  as  the  causality  is  made  an  in- 
tegral part  of  evolution,  and  that  a  causality 
inherent  in  things  themselves,  the  definition 
of  Hseckel  is  to  be  preferred,  both  for  its 
frankness  and  its  clearness,  when  he  says: 
— "The  general  theory  of  evolution  assumes 
that  in  nature  there  is  a  great,  unital,  con- 
tinuous, and  everlasting  process  of  develop- 
ment; and  that  all  natural  phenomena  with- 
out exception,  from  the  motion  of  the  celestial 
bodies  and  the  fall  of  the  rolling  stone,  up  to 
the  growth  of  the  plant  and  the  consciousness 
of  man,  are  subject  to  the  same  great  law  of 
causation;  that  they  are  ultimately  to  be  re- 
duced to  atomic  mechanics." 

Now,  just  so  far  as  exponents  of  evolution 
assume  to  exclude  the  operation  of  causes 
other  than  those  inherent  in  matter,  they 
transcend  the  limits  of  a  true  science.  It 
has  to  do  merely  with  the  how,  and  not  the 
whence,  of  things. 

Dr.  Carpenter,  in  his  address  before  the 
British  Association  in  1872,  justly  says: — 
"  When  science  sets  up  its  own  concep- 
tion of  the  order  of  nature  as   a  sufficient 


OF  EVOLUTION.  13 

account  of  its  cause,  it  is  invading  a  province 
of  thought  to  which  it  has  no  claim."  "To 
set  up  the  laws  of  nature  as  self-acting,  and  as 
excluding  or  rendering  unnecessary  the  power 
which  alone  can  give  them  effect,  appears  to 
me  as  arrogant  as  it  is  unphilosophical." 

So  also  W.  Stanley  Jevons,  in  his  full  and  ex- 
haustive treatise  on  "  The  Principles  of  Science," 
in  controverting  the  idea  that  "the  course  of 
nature  is  being  determined  by  invariable  prin- 
ciples of  mechanics,  which  have  acted  since 
the  world  began  and  will  act  for  infinite  ages 
to  come,"  says,  "Such  notions  I  would  de- 
scribe as  superficial  and  erroneous,  being  de- 
rived, as  J.  think,  from  false  views  of  the  nature 
of  scientific  inference,  and  the  degree  of  cer- 
tainty of  the  knowledge  which  we  acquire  by 
inductive  investigation"  (p.  430).  Further 
on,  in  another  connection,  but  speaking  of 
the  same  class  of  scientists,  he  says,  "there 
is  an  erroneous  and  hurtful  tendency  to  rep- 
resent our  knowledge  as  assuming  an  approxi- 
mately complete  character"  (p.  449). 

These  authorities  will  suffice,  I  take  it,  to 
bear  me  out  in  the  declaration,  that  it  is 
unscientific  and  pure  assumption,  to  assert 
that  there  have  been  no  causes  at  work  in 
producing  present  diversity  except  those  cap- 
able of  scientific  analysis. 


14  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

There  is  no  ground,  except  as  it  is  hidden 
away  in  the  terms  of  a  faulty  definition,  for 
the  postulate  that  the  process  of  evolution 
has  known  no  other  causality  than  that  in- 
herent in  nature  itself  and  discoverable  by 
science. 

We  are  willing  to  accept  what  science  can 
demonstrate,  and  feel  ourselves  the  richer  for 
its  many  contributions  to  our  stores  of  knowl- 
edge, but  we  cannot  accede  to  the  claim  that 
there  is  nothing  real  or  credible  beyond  the 
narrow  limits  in  which  its  observations  are 
made.  There  is  much  truth  outside  of  what 
can  be  measured  and  weighed  by  the  appli- 
ances of  a  purely  natural  science,  and  it  is  not 
by  any  means  axiomatic,  as  some  scientists 
seem  to  imply,  that  what  science  cannot 
formulate  is  either  non-existent  or  unknow- 
able. The  fact  is  that  science  itself  is  ever, 
and  on  all  sides,  meeting  with  phenomena 
inexplicable  by  its  formulated  or  discovera- 
ble causes.  As  Jevons  well  puts  it,  "The 
more  we  have  explained  the  more  there  is 
to  explain." 

Sir  W.  R  Grove,  whose  name  is  inseparably 
associated  with  "the  correlation  of  forces,"  con- 
cedes his  inability  to  pass  beyond  the  phenom- 
ena of  light,  heat,  electricity,  magnetism,  mo- 
tion and  chemical   aifinity.     He  says,    "  We 


OF  EVOLUTION.  15 

are  totally  unacquainted  with  the  ultimate 
generating  power  of  each  and  all  of  them, 
and  probably  shall  ever  remain  so;  we  can 
only  ascertain  the  normse  (the  rules)  of  their 
action :"  from  all  which  it  is  clear  that,  from  the 
standpoint  of  a  true  science,  anything  in  the 
definition  of  evolution  that  limits  its  causes, 
and  excludes  all  others  than  those  immanent 
in  the  world  itself,  is  unscientific,  and  nothing 
but  an  arrogant  assumption. 

This  may  be  accounted  one  of  the  untruths 
of  evolution,  as  it  is  the  parent  of  many  others. 

Excluding  this  gratuitous  limiting  of  its  cau- 
sation, it  seems  most  probable  that  evolution, 
considered  as  descriptive  oithe  process  by  which 
the  world  has  come  to  its  present  condition,  is 
likely  to  become  established.  Already  with 
the  majority  of  scientists  is  it  accepted  as  a 
working  hypothesis,  and  each  year  is  adding 
to  the  number  of  those  who  in  this  sense  are 
evolutionists. 

In  other  words,  that  the  universe  and  living 
beings  have  come  to  their  present  condition 
through  a  process  of  gradual  modification  of 
previous  conditions, — i.  e.,  through  a  develop- 
ment, an  evolution, — is  coming  to  be  regarded 
as  harmonizing  more  facts  and  offering  fewer 
difficulties  than  the  un til-recently-accepted  hy- 
pothesis of  special  creations.     It  is  in  this  as- 


16  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

pect,  in  presenting  the  present  as  born  of  the 
past,  that  evolution  has  in  it  an  important 
and  valuable  truth. 

A  half-century  ago  men  were  beginning, 
through  the  progress  of  geological  investi- 
gations, to  gather  the  idea  that  the  earth 
had  not  come  into  being  as  it  is  now,  but 
that  it  had  been  progressively  fitted  to  be 
the  support  of  life  and  the  home  of  man. 
But  while  thus  abandoning  the  idea  that  God 
by  a  single  fiat  had  fashioned  the  dwelling- 
place,  nine-tenths  and  more  of  all  the  stu- 
dents of  its  living  inhabitants  were  studying 
them  in  the  light  of  the  accepted  hypothesis, 
that  every  true  species  of  the  vegetable  and 
animal  kingdoms,  now  existing,  had  origi- 
nated in  the  simultaneous  creation  of  a  first 
pair. 

This  was  so  generally  held,  not,  as  the 
skeptical  scientist  is  fond  of  asserting,  be- 
cause of  the  accepted  theological  or  biblical 
theory  of  the  origin  of  things,  but  because 
the  idea  of  permanence  was  embodied  in 
every  accepted  definition  of  what  constitutes 
a  species. 

De  Candolle,  the  botanist,  defined  a  species 
of  plants  by  saying,  "We  unite  under  the  des- 
ignation of  a  species  all  those  individuals  that 
mutually  bear  to  each  other  so  close  a  resera- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  17 

blance  as  to  allow  of  our  supposing  that  they 
may  have  proceeded  originally  from  a  single 
being  or  a  single  pair;"  and  Cuvier,  an  equal 
authority  as  a  zoologist,  defined  a  species  as 
"a  succession  of  individuals  which  reproduces 
and  perpetuates  itself."  So  long  as  these  de- 
finitions were  accepted  as  correct,  there  was 
no  escape  from  the  inference  that  each  species 
must  reach  back  to  an  original  pair,  and  that 
they  had  proceeded  directly  from  the  hand  of 
the  Creator. 

The  immutability  of  species  was  then  an  in- 
superable, as  it  is  even  now  a  serious,  difficulty, 
in  the  way  of  the  acceptance  of  any  hypothesis 
of  evolution. 

The  strength  of  this  objection  has  been 
weakened,  but  not  altogether  destroyed,  by 
the  Darwinian  theory  of  natural  selection,  to 
the  promulgation  of  which,  and  to  the  inves- 
tigations which  it  has  stimulated,  are  princi- 
pally due  the  influence  and  wide  acceptance 
of  evolution.  Whatever  may  be  the  ultimate 
fate  of  Darwin's  particular  theories,  it  is  beyond 
question  that  he  inaugurated  a  revolution  in 
scientific  methods,  and  lived  to  see  evolution 
become  the  prevalent  working  hypothesis  of 
science. 

And  yet  the  acceptance  of  the  later  theory, 
so  far  as  it  has  been  accepted,  is  due  much 


18  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

less  to  the  positive  arguments  in  its  favor,  than 
to  those  negative  ones  which  have  tended  to 
its  advantage  through  casting  a  doubt  on,  or 
positively  disproving,  the  earlier  hypothesis. 

It  has  not  yet  been  satisfactorily  shown  how 
species  have  originated,  nor  that  a  true  species 
is  other  than  immutable,  and  yet  it  has  been 
made  certain  that  if  species  were  created  it 
was  not  in  the  way  and  manner  formerly 
supposed.  And  this  has  been  so  generally 
accepted  that  evolution  is  regarded  as  a  ten- 
tative and  probable  hypothesis — at  least  as  a 
method  of  creation — by  many  who  fully  dis- 
cern the  weakness  of  its  positive  arguments. 

The  original  hypothesis  of  special  creations 
covered  not  only  the  fact  of  a  creation,  but  a 
particular  mode  of  creation.  It  supposed  a 
special  fiat  for  each  species,  that  each  primi- 
tive pair  came  into  being  in  maturity  and  all 
simultaneously. 

The  advance  of  geological  science  demon- 
strated long  since  that  the  old  conception  of 
a  simultaneous  creation  of  all  types  was  erro- 
neous ;  new  species  have  been  appearing  upon 
the  scene  all  along  the  course  of  earth's  geo- 
logical history.  The  present  geographical  dis- 
tribution of  living  forms  shows  that  many 
species  of  plants  and  animals  are  limited  in 
their  geographical  range,  and  that  continents 


OF   EVOLUTION.  19 

and  seas  and  islands,  as  well  as  the  different 
zones,  each  have  their  flora  and  fauna,  so 
that  different  centres  as  well  as  different 
epochs  of  creation  must  be  supposed. 

Beyond  this,  the  vast  and  rapid  growth  in 
the  number  of  species — each,  under  the  old 
definition  of  species,  a  special  creation, — has 
served  to  raise  the  question,  whether  it  be 
not  more  rational  to  attribute  at  least  some 
of  these  variations  to  modifications  by  de- 
scent. For  example,  the  total  number  of 
animal  species  described  up  to  1831  was 
70,000,  in  the  fifty  years  since  the  number 
has  grown  to  320,000,  while  it  is  estimated  that 
not  a  day  passes  without  adding  to  the  list. 
Not  less  than  12,000  species  of  insects  alone 
it  is  stated  are  awaiting  description  in  the 
museums  of  natural  history.  In  the  vege- 
table kingdom  the  number  of  species  is  even 
more  numerous.  And  when  we  add  to  the 
recent  forms  those  of  the  geological  series, 
the  estimate  of  fully  2,000,000  different  spe- 
cies as  the  total  does  not  seem  excessive.2 

When  we  remember  that  among  these  mul- 
titudinous species  many  are  separated  by  mi- 
nute characteristics,  and  all  from  the  highest 
to  the  lowest  so  gradually  shade  off  one  into 
another  that  it  is  difficult  to  draw  dividing 
2  See  Lubbock's  "Fifty  Years  of  Science,"  p.  15. 


20  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

lines,  we  can  readily  understand  how  many 
scientists  came  to  question  whether  independ- 
ence of  origin  was  necessary  to  the  idea  of  a 
species,  and  whether  the  old  conception  of  the 
mode  of  creation  did  not  need  modification. 

It  was  such  facts  and  considerations  as 
these  that  led  Darwin  and  Wallace  independ- 
ently to  formulate  the  theory  of  "  survival 
of  the  fittest,"  and  convinced  many  that  it  is 
necessary  to  modify  the  creation  hypothesis, 
so  as  to  reduce  the  number  of  special  creations, 
and  give  greater  potency  to  secondary  causes 
in  producing  existing  diversity. 

The  modern  progress  of  biology,  in  calling 
attention  to  the  community  of  embryological 
substance  and  form,  the  identity  in  plan  of 
structure  which  brings  into  relationship  most 
diverse  individuals,  and  the  presence  in  many 
species,  of  rudimentary  organs  of  which  there 
can  be  given  no  satisfactory  explanation  on 
the  theory  of  independent  creation,  has  con- 
tributed still  further  to  give  probability  to 
the  theory  of  modification  by  descent. 

The  same  science,  by  demonstrating  that  dif- 
ferentiation begins  way  back  in  the  nucleus 
of  protoplasm,  beyond  the  detection  of  the 
microscope  or  chemical  analysis,  gives  the 
highest  probability  to  the  theory  that  God 
when  He  creates   does  so  by  touching   the 


OF   EVOLUTION.  21 

hidden  sources  of  being,  and  leaves  the  vis- 
ible form  to  shape  itself  by  the  interaction  of 
inherent  properties  and  general  laws. 

All  this  renders  it  probable  that  things  and 
beings  are  what  they  are  by  some  process  of 
gradual  modification.  To  it  properly  attaches 
the  name  of  evolution,  provided  it  be  supposed 
to  begin  subsequent  to  the  creative  act. 

Evolution,  regarded  as  descriptive  of  a  pro- 
cess in  nature,  has  much,  we  thus  see,  to 
commend  it,  but'  it  ought  to  be  distinctly  re- 
membered and  emphasized  that  it  is  as  yet  a 
mere  theory,  and  must  not  be  regarded  as 
having  more  than  a  hypothetical  value.  In 
whatever  form  it  be  held, — whether  that  be- 
hind which  infidels  and  agnostics  hide  and 
defend  their  unwillingness  to  believe,  or  that 
which  many  Christians  hold  in  conjunction 
with  their  faith  in  God  and  the  Bible, — it 
must  not  be  lost  sight  of,  that  it  is  yet  un- 
proven,  and  may  not  properly  be  used  for  any 
other  purpose,  or  in  any  other  way,  than  is 
legitimate  for  an  hypothesis.  Because  a  theory 
harmonizes  with  very  many  facts,  with  more 
than  a  previous  or  rival  theory,  does  not 
make  it  any  less  a  theory,  or  convert  it  into 
an  established  principle.  The  key  that  fits 
all  the  wards  of  the  lock  is  the  only  true 
key,   and  only  the  theory  that  fits   all   the 


22  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

facts  may  be  accounted  the  absolutely  true 
one.  Few  scientific  theories  to-day  can  en- 
dure this  test,  and  least  of  all  this  of  evolu- 
tion. However,  for  purposes  of  investiga- 
tion and  as  a  help  to  scientific  progress,  a 
theory — an  hypothesis — may  be  most  use- 
ful, even  if  unestablished,  and  possibly  or 
even  probably  erroneous.  Science  has  made 
and  is  making  her  progress  with  just  such 
hypotheses,  scarcely  any  but  what  are  contra- 
dicted at  certain  points  and  so  strongly  as  to 
awaken  the  suspicion  that  a  new  and  broader 
generalization  will  some  day  succeed  them. 

The  nebular  hypothesis  has  yet  to  fit  into 
itself  the  anomalous  movements  of  the  moons 
of  Uranus.  The  atomic  theory  so  useful  in 
developing  our  knowledge  of  chemistry  has 
had  to  be  modified  again  and  again,  and  in 
the  opinion  of  many  chemists  is  almost  certain 
at  no  distant  day  to  give  way  to  a  theory 
more  consonant  with  all  the  facts.  The  mo- 
dulatory theory  of  light  seems  almost  mathe- 
matically demonstrable,  yet  the  difficulties 
presented  in  the  supposition  of  a  transmit- 
ting ether  are  such  as  to  strongly  suggest 
that  the  ultimate  explanation  of  the  old  time 
"imponderables"  and  the  present  "correlated 
forces"  has  not  yet  been  reached. 

We  cannot  dispense  with  either  of  these  by- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  23 

potheses,  they  fit  into  more  of  the  facts  than 
an}'  other,  and  yet  each  is,  after  years  of  in- 
vestigation, nnestablished,  and  will  possibly 
some  day  be  superseded  by  some  more  com- 
prehensive and  truer  generalization.  If  it  be 
so  with  these  older  and  better  tested  theories, 
how  much  more  need  of  a  cautious  and  ten- 
tative use  of  that  which  has  only  yesterday 
become  probable. 

No  one  who  is  at  all  imbued  with  a  proper 
reverence  for  true  science  can  do  other  than 
protest  against  that  advocacy  of  evolution 
which  claims  for  it  triumphant  establishment, 
and  reasons  from  it  as  from  a  very  axiom  of 
science.  It  has  indeed  a  possible  truthfulness, 
but  its  difficulties  are  yet  many  and  great. 

If  I  were  to  formulate  a  definition  of  evo- 
lution, such  as  the  present  condition  of  our 
knowledge  warrants,  it  would  be  this: — 

Evolution  is  that  hypothesis  which  sup- 
poses the  process  by  which  present  diversity 
in  nature  has  been  reached  to  have  been  one 
of  progression ;  the  more  complex  and  better 
endowed,  proceeding  in  accordance  with  laws 
imperfectly  known,  out  of  simpler  and  lower 
forms. 

It  seems  probable  there  has  been  some 
such  evolution  as  this,  and  this  is  as  far 
as  a  scientific  definition  is  able  to  go. 


24  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

The  philosophical  forms  of  the  evolution 
theory,  i.  e.,  the  forms  it  assumes  when  co-or- 
dinated Avith  other  knowledge,  and  applied  to 
the  world-old  problems  of  the  "whence"  and 
the  "whither"  of  the  universe,  are  principally 
three: — Materialistic,  Agnostic,  and  Theistic 

The  first  is  characterized  by  the  recognition 
of  nothing  but  efficient  or  mechanical  causes, 
rejecting  all  forces  other  than  those  inherent 
in  nature  itself.  Hence  is  eliminated  from  the 
universe  the  First  Cause — a  personal,  intelli- 
gent, self-existent  Creator,  and  equally  final 
cause,  the  supposed  evidence  of  design.  Such 
evolution  is  simply  blind,  unintelligent  pro- 
gression, controlled  by  merely  natural  forces, 
from  fire-mist  to  man. 

It  seeks  vainly  to  give  any  plausible  account 
of  origins,  and  makes  man — doomed  to  die, 
and  a  mere  automaton — the  highest  product 
and  the  only  goal,  of  this  mechanical  process. 
It  abounds  in  startling  assumptions,  and,  its 
advocates  themselves  being  witnesses,  it  is 
wanting  in  essential  evidence  at  well-nigh 
every  vital  point.  This  perceived  weakness 
of  the  argument  for  a  purely  materialistic  ev- 
olution would  seem  the  real  occasion  for  the 
formulation  of  the  second  form  of  the  hy- 
pothesis, the  agnostic,  which  diifers  from  the 
materialistic  only  in  granting  the  possibility 


OF  EVOLUTION.  25 

of  a  cause,  back  of  and  higher  than  mechan- 
ical force,  but  claiming*  that  its  existence  and 
its  nature  are  alike  unknowable.  This  "  un- 
knowable" is  so  plainly  nothing  but  a  cleus 
ex  mackina,  a  mere  device  to  escape  a  formal 
denial  of  a  first  cause,  that  it  is  of  little  weight. 
As  in  all  else,  agnostic  evolution  agrees  with 
materialistic,  we  shall  in  our  further  discus- 
sions treat  them  as  one.  The  difficulties  of 
materialistic  and  agnostic  evolution,  and  the 
failure  of  their  advocates  to  meet  them,  will 
be  considered  in  our  succeeding  lectures,  treat- 
ing of  the  applications  of  the  hypothesis;  for 
which  reason  we  shall  not  now  pause  to  con- 
sider them  further  than  to  make  a  remark 
or  two  on  a  fundamental  characteristic, — their 
denial  of  what  are  known  as  final  causes. 

These  must  be  eliminated  from  nature  or 
else  they  abide,  as  they  have  ever  been  re- 
garded, the  conclusive  proofs  of  the  existence 
of  a  God — the  Cause  of  causes,  and  the  solid 
basis  of  a  knowledge  of  His  attributes. 

Hence,  many  and  beautiful  and  complicated 
as  are  the  contrivances  and  adaptations  to  be 
noted  everywhere  in  nature,  admirable  as  are 
the  adjustments  by  which  beneficent  ends  are 
secured,  Ave  are  bidden  to  see  in  them  all,  noth- 
ing foreseen  or  intended  by  a  superior  power, 
but  only  the  necessary  outcome  of  the  fortui- 


26  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

tous  interaction  of  unintelligent  and  unchange- 
able forces,  called  laws.  "It  is  plain,"  as  says 
Janet  in  his  unanswered  and  I  believe  unan- 
swerable argument  in  defence  of  final  causes 
and  the  old  teleological  method,  "  that  this 
is  nothing  but  the  theory  of  chance  under 
a  learned  disguise." 

He  says  substantially:  "If  by  evolution 
anything  more  is  intended  to  be  expressed 
than  the  gradation  of  organic  beings,  rising 
step  by  step,  or  at  intervals,  from  the  less 
perfect  to  the  more  perfect  forms, — a  pro- 
cess that  necessitates  the  idea  of  intelligent 
control,  it  is  only  another  name  for  the  Epi- 
curean's fortuitous  concourse  of  atoms,  and 
expresses  the  successive  gropings  of  nature, 
until  favoring  circumstances  bring  such  a 
cast  of  the  dice  as  evokes  an  organization 
that  can  survive.  And  when  evolution,  in 
admitting  nothing  but  efficient  causes,  brings 
itself  to  this  position,  it  is  exposed  to  the 
objections  that  in  all  past  time  have  been 
urged  against  the  idea  that  the  world  can 
be  the  product  of  chance."  3 

There  is  in  phenomena,  a  manifest  working 
unto  an  end,  and  no  system  that  denies  this 

3  See  Janet's  "Les  Causes  Finales,"  original  edition, 
p.  416.  And  "Final  Causes,"  the  translation  of  the  sec- 
ond edition,  p.  282. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  27 

will  ever  commend  itself  as  true  to  nature. 
This  has  been  well  elaborated  by  the  Duke  of 
Argyle,  as  well  as  the  French  savant,  neither 
of  whose  arguments  have  been  successfully 
met. 

The  fact  that  the  difficulties  in  the  way 
of  materialistic  or  agnostic  evolution  are  so 
many  and  crucial,  requiring  of  its  advocates 
a  boldness  of  assumption  and  a  baldness  of 
dogmatic  assertion,  that  are  anything  but  sci- 
entific, gives  to  the  remaining  form  of  the 
hypothesis — the  theistic—o,  natural  precedence. 
Even  many  who  are  inclined  to  the  other 
forms  of  the  theory,  are  constrained,  by  the  in- 
vincible character  of  the  objections  to  a  purely 
natural  origin  of  matter  and  life,  to  assume  a 
Creator,  and  so  far  are  to  be  accounted  the- 
ists,  even  though,  as  is  the  case  with  some, 
the  Creator  is  scarcely  more  than  an  initial 
force.  Aside  from  such,  it  is  proper  to  divide 
theistic  evolutionists  into  two  schools,  both  of 
whom  hold  to  a  Creator  who  is  not  a  mere 
logical  abstraction,  but  a  Self-existent,  All- 
powerful,  All- wise  Personage— a  true  God. 

The  one  supposes  creation  a  single  act,  which 
wrought,  the  Creator  is  remanded  back  into 
the  heavens  as  no  longer  needed,  since  the 
result  of  creation  is  so  perfect  a  mechanism 
as  not  to  require,  at  any  subsequent  point, 


28  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

adjustment,  superintendence,  or  control.  We 
do  not  dispute  the  grandeur  of  this  conception, 
and  fully  recognize  the  homage  it  bestows  on 
the  wisdom  as  well  as  the  might  of  the  Cre- 
ator. It  is,  we  allow,  worthy  of  an  infinite 
mechanician  to  construct  a  machine  that  will 
perpetuate  itself  and  never  need  the  interven- 
tion of  its  maker.  The  chief  difficulty  is,  that 
it  fails  to  adequately  explain  the  facts. 

The  other  supposes  not  only  that  God  created, 
but  that  He  also  governs  and  controls  Plis  han- 
dy work.  It  holds  fast  to  a  Providence,  as  wrell 
as  a  first  cause,  believes  that  God  is  "the  Father 
Almighty"  as  well  as  "the  Maker  of  heaven  and 
earth."  This  is  the  only  form  of  the  evolution 
hypothesis,  it  seems  to  me,  that  adequately 
meets  the  facts,  that  has  a  probability  of  es- 
tablishment, and  that  the  Christian  can  ac- 
cept. This  sees  in  the  history  of  the  universe 
a  process  of  evolution,  but  it  is  one  origina- 
ted and  controlled  by  Divine  intelligence  and 
power.  It  supposes  the  existence  and  opera- 
tion of  fixed  and  unchangeable  laws,  efficient 
agents  in  carrying  out  the  plan  of  the  Great 
Architect,  but  they  are  what  they  are,  and 
have  efficiency,  by  the  ordinance  and  appoint- 
ment of  the  Creator,  and  He  is  ever  and  al- 
ways co-ordinating  and  controlling  their  in- 
teraction unto  the  accomplishing  of  purposed 


OF  EVOLUTION.  29 

results.  It  is,  in  other  words,  as  Joseph  Cook 
has  recently  well  said,  an  evolution  not  by 
law,  but  according  to  law. 

The  advances  and  discoveries  of  science 
have,  it  may  be,  overthrown  the  conceptions 
of  a  simultaneous  creation  of  living  forms 
in  their  maturity;  they  may  have,  and  we 
believe  they  have,  made  probable  that  the 
earth's  history — the  process  by  which  present 
existences  have  received  their  being  and  form — 
has  been  an  evolution;  that  the  development 
of  the  individual  is  a  type  of  that  of  the  sum 
of  human  beings;  and,  in  addition,  that  this 
evolution  has  been  largely  or  mainly  wrought 
out  by  forces  or  laws  inherent  in  things  them- 
selves. Nevertheless,  at  the  beginning  must  be 
supposed  a  Creator,  omnipotent  and  all- wise; 
for  only  thus  can  be  explained  the  origin  and 
the  wondrous  adaptations  of  the  universe. 
Equally,  to  account  for  the  progressive  modi- 
fications of  earth  and  its  inhabitants,  the  main- 
tenance of  that  beneficent  equilibrium  through 
which  earth  has  teemed  with  life  and  the  prog- 
ress has  been  upward  rather  than  downward, 
there  is  need  not  only  of  a  Creator,  and  a  cre- 
ation way  back  in  the  beginning,  but  of  a 
presiding  Providence,  and  creations  all  along 
the  ages.  Certain  is  it,  that  again  and  again 
something  has  touched  the  springs  of  exist- 


30  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS. 

ence  and  given  a  new  trend  to  being.  It  is 
perhaps  impossible  to  decide,  and  we  do  not 
know  that  it  matters,  whether  God  has  done 
it  directly,  or  through  an  agency  implanted 
by  Him.  In  either  case,  it  bespeaks  Him  a 
living  potential  Being,  presiding  over,  as  well 
as  originating,  the  universe ;  and  this,  we  take 
it,  is  the  essential  fact  to  be  established  in  the 
present  discussion.  So  long  as  one  holds  on 
to  faith  in  God, — the  Father  Almighty  pre- 
siding over  and  administering  the  govern- 
ment of  the  world, — he  is  on  safe  ground. 

Let  evolution  be  seen  to  be  only  an  instru- 
ment or  method  of  God,  and  it  ceases  to  be 
antagonistical  to  faith  and  religion.  As  with 
every  hypothesis,  so  with  this,  the  truth  is  to 
be  ascertained  by  the  success  with  which  it  uni- 
fies and  harmonizes  the  facts  it  is  propounded 
to  explain.  The  truths  and  untruths  of  evolu- 
tion, will  be  exhibited  by  its  success  or  failure 
in  solving  the  problems  that  present  them- 
selves in  earth  and  man,  civilization  and  re- 
ligion. Into  these  fields  we  purpose  to  press 
the  inquiry. 


LECTURE  SECOND. 

EVOLUTION   AND    THE   EABTH. 

In  my  last  lecture  I  examined  the  defini- 
tions and  philosophical  forms  of  the  evolution 
hypothesis,  pointed  out  what  I  conceived  to 
suggest  an  untruth  in  the  common  definitions, 
and  among  the  philosophical  forms,  indicated 
as  the  only  one  likely  to  be  established,  the 
theistic,  which  makes  it  the  expression  of  the 
creative  wisdom  and  providential  control  of 
that  God  whom  we  reverence  and  worship. 
The  views  expressed  are  now  to  be  tested  by 
application  to  the  facts  with  which  the  hy- 
pothesis has  to  do. 

It  is  plainly  vital  to  any  form  of  the  theory 
which  eliminates  God,  and  a  controlling  intel- 
ligence from  the  universe,  that  its  account  of 
origins  and  its  series  of  causations  be  complete. 
It  must  take  in,  not  only  the  phenomena  of  the 
material  world,  but  of  humanity,  civilization, 
morals  and  religion.  It  must  exhibit  and 
prove  a  necessary  and  unintelligent  progress 


32  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

from  primordial  atoms,  up  to  the  highest  man- 
ifestations of  human  intelligence  and  morality, 
— connect  by  an  unbroken  gradation  of  ascent 
the  diatom  and  infusoria  with,  a  Shakespeare 
and  a  Newton, — protoplasm  with  the  phe- 
nomena of  conscience  and  the  ethics  of  Chris- 
tianity. A  break  anywhere  in  the  long  chain, 
the  failure  anywhere  along  the  line  to  show  a 
necessary  connection,  the  having  at  any  point 
to  suppose  or  invoke  a  determining  power  out- 
side of  nature,  at  once  makes  possible,  proba- 
ble, and  perfectly  reasonable,  the  existence  of 
a  controlling  mind  independent  of  nature,  and 
gives  the  highest  probability  to  the  theory 
that  the  entire  process  from  beginning  to  end 
is  under  its  direction  and  efficient  control. 

In  this  lecture  I  desire  to  inquire  how  sat- 
isfactorily the  existence  and  present  condition 
of  the  earth  can  be  accounted  for  on  the  theory 
of  materialistic  or  agnostic  evolution.  The 
inquiry  is  briefly  this : — Is  it  possible  to  sup- 
pose our  planet,  in  its  past  and  present  con- 
ditions, the  product  of  causes  or  forces  inher- 
ent in  matter  itself,  or  must  we,  to  account 
for  earth  and  its  contents,  predicate  some- 
thing outside  of  and  superior  to  nature, — a 
Supreme  Intelligence,  a  Self-determining  Will? 

It  has  always  been  the  weakness  of  evolu- 
tion hypotheses,  from  the  days  of  Democritus 


OF  EVOLUTION.  33 

and  Lucretius  down  to  Lamarck  and  St.  Ili- 
laire,  that  they  failed  to  give  even  a  plausible 
explanation  of  crucial  facts.  We  proceed  to 
inquire  whether  at  the  present  day  the  situa- 
tion has  materially  changed. 

The  theory  of  Kant  and  Laplace  as  to  the 
method  of  world-building,  known  as  the  neb- 
ular hypothesis,  is  the  starting  point  of  every 
modern  theory  of  evolution.  This,  though 
yet  a  mere  supposition,  serves  to  bring  into 
unity  and  scientific  correlation  so  many  facts, 
both  of  astronomy  and  geology,  that  all  sci- 
entists use  it  as  a  working  hypothesis,  and  re- 
gard it  as  a  most  probable  account  of  the 
origin  of  the  solar  system  and  of  the  earth's 
structure.  The  time  has  long  passed  when  it 
was  regarded  as  in  conflict  with  revealed  re- 
ligion, and  as  superseding  a  Creator.  The 
devout  Christian  scientist  holds  to  it  as  firmly, 
and  accepts  it  as  an  account  of  the  way  God 
built  the  world,  as  freely  as  the  materialist 
who  argues  from  it  that  the  world  need  have, 
and  has,  no  Creator. 

The  fact  is,  that  this,  as  the  theory  of  evo- 
lution itself,  is  and  can  be  interpreted  in  ac- 
cordance with  either  conception.  Our  con- 
cern with  it  is  to  ascertain,  not  so  much  its 
truthfulness,  as  whether,  if  it  be  true,  it  affords 
any  countenance  to  the  idea  that  the  world  is 


34:  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

self-evolved, — that  there  has  been  no  inter- 
ference from  without. 

The  nebular  hypothesis,  as  you  know,  is 
briefly  this:  that  originally  the  entire  space 
occupied  by  the  solar  system  was  filled  by 
an  evenly  diffused  nebulous  mass  of  matter. 
This  mass  is  supposed  to  possess  a  slow  ro- 
tary motion.  Under  the  reciprocal  attrac- 
tion of  its  parts  condensation  goes  on,  under 
which  the  rotation  is  accelerated,  so  that  un- 
der well-known  mechanical  laws  successive 
rings  are  formed,  and  then  spheres :  thus  the 
planets  and  their  satellites,  each  moving  in 
the  same  plane  and  at  proportionate  distances, 
come  into  being,  while  the  central  mass  as  it 
contracts  gives  off  light  and  heat  and  remains 
the  controlling  centre  of  the  system. 

While  this  method  of  world-formation  was 
first  proposed  as  pure  hypothesis,  and  yet  re- 
mains an  hypothesis,  it  so  well  suits  and  ex- 
plains the  circular  character  of  the  planetary 
orbits,  the  plane  in  which  they  lie,  the  uniform 
directions  of  their  revolutions,  and  the  oblate 
spheroid  shape  of  the  earth,  that  though  there 
are  facts  that  are  yet  inexplicable  by  it,  it  is  gen- 
erally accepted  as  the  most  probable  mode  by 
which  the  solar  system  came  to  be  what  it  is. 

Granting  all  that  is  claimed  for  it,  accept- 
ing it  as  true,  does  it  make  unnecessary  an 


OF  EVOLUTION.  35 

intelligent  Creator  and  Ruler  ?  Does  it  afford 
the  materialistic  evolutionist  all  he  needs  for 
a  starting  point  in  the  long  course  of  unintelli- 
gent upward  progression  ?  We  say  nothing 
here  about  what  must,  on  his  supposition,  be 
potentially  present  in  the  fire-mist,  in  the  prim- 
itive nebulous  mass; — the  life,  intelligence, 
and  consciousness  which  are  manifested  in  the 
higher  and  later  stages  of  the  process,  which  has 
here  its  beginning.  We  do  not  now  press  the 
difficulty  of  supposing  that  in  this  original 
matter  there  is  "  the  promise  and  potency  of 
every  form  and  quality  of  life." 

There  are  sufficiently  formidable  chasms  to 
be  bridged  before  we  come  to  this.  Whence 
the  matter?  Whence  the  force?  Whence 
the  relation  of  the  two  ?  Whence  that  exact 
adjustment  of  materials,  motions,  interac- 
tions, and  combinations,  from  which  has 
resulted  earth,  as  habitable  and  the  abode  of 
order, — a  cosmos  rather  than  a  chaos?  At 
the  very  beginning  of  his  chain  of  successive 
transformations  the  materialist  has  to  predi- 
cate matter  and  force, — and  both  in  definite 
and  fixed  amounts.  For  it  is  as  well  estab- 
lished, as  the  case  admits,  that  matter  and 
force  are  each  indestructible,  and  hence  are 
the  same  in  amount  to-day  as  when  present 
in    the    nebulous    mass.     From    nothing    to 


36  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

matter, — and  if  force  be  not  a  part  of  matter, 
from  matter  to  force, — are  leaps  that  are  be- 
yond even  the  imagination  of  the  materialistic 
evolutionist.  And,  therefore,  if  he  may  noi 
accept  a  creator  and  a  creation,  he  is  shut 
up  to  an  eternity  of  both  matter,  and  the 
source,  whatever  it  be,  of  its  motion. 

This,  if  at  all  conceivable,  is  only  so  on  the 
supposition  of  eternal  cyclical  changes.  The 
primitive  nebula  must  be  regarded  as  only 
the  debris  of  former  worlds,  and  the  outcome 
of  the  evolution  now  going  on  will  be  an 
ultimate  return  to  primordial  atoms. 

The  very  postulate  of  evolution — it  being 
a  progression  from  the  simple  to  the  complex, 
implying  alike  a  starting  point  and  a  goal — 
would  seem  to  sufficiently  negative  this  con- 
ception. But,  beyond  this,  the  evolutionist's 
own  theory  of  the  correlation  of  forces  seems 
to  demonstrate  its  impossibility.  What  Sir 
William  Thomson  has  called  "  the  dissipation 
of  energy "  is  mathematically  proven  to  be 
going  on  continually,  so  that  the  sun's  heat, 
the  source  of  energy  so  far  as  our  system  is 
concerned,  is  passing  out  into  space,  from 
which  it  does  not  return.1     It  can  .therefore 

1  For  a  full  and  clear  statement  and  discussion  of  this 
"dissipation  of  energy,"  see  Newcomb's  "Astronomy," 
pp.  500-505.  Also  Jevon's  "Principles  of  Science,"  pp. 
441-8. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  37 

be  predicted  that  the  present  constitution  of 
the  solar  system  will  not  endure  forever, — 
that  the  time  is  coming  when  the  sun  will  be 
a  cold  and  burnt-out  mass,  and  the  mechan- 
ical energy  of  the  universe  will  be  exhausted. 
By  the  very  law  by  which  all  force  is  con- 
vertible into  heat, — since  that  ultimate  form  of 
energy  is  certainly  being  dissipated,  and  its 
entire  reconversion  into  mechanical  power  is 
impossible, — it  follows  that  the  mechanism  will 
run  down  and  the  machine  stop,  as  certainly 
as  a  clock,  when  the  weights  no  longer  exert 
their  influence. 

This  necessary  end  of  the  process — implying 
as  it  does  its  beginning — negatives,  it  would 
seem,  the  only  possible  form  of  the  supposition, 
that  mattter  and  force  are  eternal.  In  fact 
scarcely  a  single  materialistic  evolutionist  is 
found  who  longer  claims  for  them  eternity. 
The  thorough-going  materialist  leaves  the 
problem  unsolved,  the  agnostic  places  it  in 
the  domain  of  the  unknowable,  while  others 
admit  that  here  a  Creator  must  be  supposed, 
however  well  He  may  be  dispensed  with  in 
the  subsequent  process.  J.  Clerk  Maxwell, 
in  article  "Atom,"  Encyclopaedia  Britannica, 
says — "We  have  reached  the  utmost  limit 
of  our  thinking  faculties  when  we  have  ad- 
mitted that,  because  matter  cannot  be  eter- 


38  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

rial  and  self-existent,  it  must  have  been 
created." 

But  the  proof  of  a  Creator  at  this  starting 
point  i3  not  merely  a  negative  one.  The 
fact  rests  not  merely  on  the  dilemma,  either 
eternity  or  Creation,  but  is  susceptible  we 
think  of  affirmative  demonstration. 

To  constitute  a  first  step  in  the  supposed 
evolution,  force  or  energy  or  motion  is  as  ne- 
cessary as  matter,  and  the  two  must  be  in  some 
form  co-ordinated  one  with  the  other.  Besides 
this,  as  the  amount  of  matter  is  a  fixed  quan- 
tity, and  according  to  an  accepted  axiom  of 
science,  it  has  not  been  and  cannot  be  in- 
creased or  diminished,  something  outside  of 
itself  must  have  established  this  amount  at 
the  time  of  its  production. 

A  parity  of  reasoning  leads  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  something  above  itself  has  meas- 
ured out  and  generated  the  precise  amount 
of  energy  which  would  suffice  to  execute 
the  work  to  be  accomplished. 

Not  only  so, — matter  exists,  we  have  every 
reason  to  believe  from  chemical  science,  in 
elemental  atoms,  which  combine  only  in  cer- 
tain fixed  and  definite  proportions.  These 
various  elements  must  be  supposed  to  have 
been  present  in  the  original  nebulous  mass, 
and  that  too  in  definite  quantities  and  pro- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  39 

portions,  so  that  not  only  the  total  of  matter 
and  energy  must  have  been  somehow  fixed 
and  determined,  but  equally  the  amount  of 
each  element,  and  the  nature  and  proportion 
of  their  chemical  affinities.  For  instance, 
there  must  have  been  just  enough  oxygen  to 
combine  according  to  its  atomic  weight  with 
all  the  different  elements  into  whose  com- 
position it  enters,  and  leave  nothing  over. 
The  same  is  true  of  hydrogen,  carbon,  nitro- 
gen, and  all  the  other  elements.  The  amount 
of  each  is  just  sufficient  and  no  more  to  make 
and  keep  the  world  the  habitable  abode  it  is. 
Now  here  is  co-ordination  that  bespeaks 
design  and  a  designer.  At  the  very  begin- 
ning, when  matter  was  in  its  simplest  forms, 
when  laws  as  the  expression  of  forces  or  prop- 
erties, were  fewest,  we  see  the  same  need  of  an 
intelligent  mind  and  ruler,  in  order  to  their 
wise  and  beneficent  collocation  and  co-ordina- 
tion, as  when  the  process  of  differentiation  had 
grown  more  complex  and  varied.  Indeed, 
the  argument  for  a  first  cause,  an  intelligent 
Creator,  is  more  unanswerable  here  than  at 
any  other  point  in  the  series,  for  these  results, 
collocations,  co-ordinations,  cannot  be  attri- 
buted to  any  previous  evolution,  cannot  be 
claimed  as  the  product  of  exclusively  efficient 
or  necessary  mechanical  causes,  but  must  be 


40  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

acknowledged  to  have  constituted  a  part  of 
the  nebulous  mass  at  its  origin.  And  this 
goes  far  to  conclusively  prove  that  both  the 
matter  and  its  contents,  were  brought  into 
being  and  co-ordinated  by  a  supreme  and 
extra-mundane  power. 

Materialistic  evolution,  therefore,  as  to  the 
very  substance  out  of  which  all  existing  forms 
are  to  proceed,  fails  to  give  any  rational  account 
of  its  origin.  It  leaves  unanswered  the  infer- 
ence that  the  nebulous  mass,  its  properties  and 
motions,  can  only  be  accounted  for  as  the  cre- 
ation of  an  all- wise  and  self-existent  ruler;  that 
there  has  been,  in  other  words,  a  beginning  in 
which  God  created  the  heavens  and  the  earth. 
The  only  refuge  from  this  conclusion  is  the 
remanding  of  everything,  back  of  the  nebulous 
matter,  to  the  region  of  the  unknowable,  leav- 
ing the  origin  of  all  things  an-unsolvable  mys- 
tery. Whoevej*  accepts  a  Creator  here,  by  so 
doing  is  compelled,  it  seems  to  us,  to  renounce 
all  a  'priori  argument  against  the  existence 
of  a  power  superior  to  nature,  and  his  subse- 
quent interference  at  other  and  later  stages  of 
the  process.  But  granting  matter  and  force — 
the  materials  for  a  mechanical  evolution — there 
is  another  abyss  that  must  be  bridged,  or  the 
process  cease  to  be  self-sufficient,  and  that  is  the 
chasm  which  separates  dead  and  living  matter. 


OF   EVOLUTION.  41 

The  introduction  of  life  upon  our  earth  is  a 
problem  that  presents  fully  as  much  and  grave 
difficulty  as  the  origination  of  matter.  And 
the  failure  to  solve  it,  is  even  more  fatal  to 
evolution  as  a  necessary,  gradual,  and  con- 
tinuous process.  For  it  necessitates  the  inter- 
position of  a  supernatural  power,  a  Creator,  not 
merely  at  the  beginning,  but  midway  in  the 
upward  progression.  Huxley,  in  his  article 
on  "  Biology,"  says:  "  If  the  hypothesis  of  evo- 
lution be  true,  living  matter  must  have  arisen 
from  not-living;  for  by  the  hypothesis,  the 
condition  of  the  globe  was  at  one  time  such 
that  living  matter  could  not  have  existed  in 
it,  life  being  completely  incompatible  with  the 
gaseous  state."  How  necessary  such  evolution- 
ists feel  it  to  be,  to  account  for  a  purely  natural 
or  mechanical  origin  of  life,  is  seen  in  Helm- 
holtz's  and  Sir  Wm.  Thomson's  suggestion 
that  it  may  have  been  introduced  from  a  mete- 
orite. On  which  supposition  Huxley  justly  ob- 
serves:— "It  makes  no  difference  if  we  adopt 
Sir  Wm.  Thomson's  hypothesis,  and  suppose 
that  the  germs  of  living  things  have  been  trans- 
ported to  our  globe  from  some  other,  seeing  that 
there  is  as  much  reason  for  supposing  that  all 
stellar  and  planetary  components  of  the  uni- 
verse are  or  have  been  gaseous,  as  that  the 
earth  has  passed  through  this  stage." 


42  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

Every  materialistic  evolutionist  feels  that 
here  is  a  crucial  test,  and  if  their  theory  is 
to  stand,  life  must  have  proceeded  out  of  the 
not-living.  Hence  it  has  been  zealously  sought 
to  prove  the  possibility  of  spontaneous  gen- 
eration, and  again  and  again  have  we  heard 
that  this  formidable  chasm  has  been  closed. 

Twice  within  the  past  twenty- five  years  has 
it  been  confidently  announced  that  sponta- 
neous generation, — abiogenesis, — life  from  the 
non-living,  has  been  experimentally  demon- 
strated. 

Pouchet,  director  of  the  Museum  of  Natural 
History  at  Rouen,  in  1859,  and  Dr.  Bastian  in 
1870,  obtained  bacteria  and  infusorial  life  from 
fluids  claimed  to  be  entirely  freed  from  every 
possible  living  germ.  Pasteur  repeated,  with 
greater  care  and  scientific  accuracy,  the  exper- 
iments of  the  former,  and  demonstrated  that 
the  inference  drawn  was  erroneous,  and  that 
life  was  only  present  when  the  germs  were 
introduced  from  the  air,  and  that  where  suf- 
ficient care  was  taken  to  obviate  this,  or  suf- 
ficient heat  employed  to  destroy  the  germs, 
life  invariably  failed  to  appear.  What  Pasteur 
did  for  Pouchet,  Tyndall  has  done  for  Dr. 
Bastian,  and  to-day  there  is  scarcely  an  evo- 
lutionist who  does  not  admit  that  at  present 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  abiogenesis — that  the 


OF  EVOLUTION.  43 

sayings,  omne  vivum  ex  vivo  and  omne.  vivum 
ex  ovo,  "all  life  from  a  living  germ,"  express 
a  universal  and  established  fact.  Tyndall  and 
all  others  agree  with  Huxley  in  saying,  "The 
properties  of  living  matter  distinguish  it  ab- 
solutely from  all  other  kinds  of  things,  and 
the  present  state  of  knowledge  furnishes  us 
with  no  link  between  the  living  and  not-liv- 
ing"; and  also,  "  The  fact  is  that  at  the  pres- 
ent moment  there  is  not  a  shadow  of  trust- 
worthy direct  evidence  that  abiogenesis  does 
take  place,  or  has  taken  place  within  the  pe- 
riod during  which  the  existence  of  life  on  the 
globe  is  recorded."2 

The  only  escape  from  the  inference  that 
life,  like  matter,  was  a  gift  of  a  living  poten- 
tial Creator,  is  that  offered  by  Huxley  in  the 
addenda  to  the  passage  already  quoted — "The 
fact,"  viz.,  that  there  is  no  evidence  that  abio- 
genesis does  take  place  or  has  taken  place, 
"  does  not  interfere  with  any  conclusion  that 
may  be  arrived  at  deductively  from  other  con- 
siderations that,  at  some  time  or  other,  abio- 
genesis must  have  taken  place."  "The  other 
considerations  "  reduce  themselves,  we  see  from 
the  course  of  his  reasoning,  merely  to  this 
syllogism :  mechanical  evolution  is  established 

2  Article  "Biology,"  Encyclopaedia Britannica,  Vol.  III., 
pp.  588-596. 


44:  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

by  irrefragable  proofs;  such  evolution  neces- 
sitates abiogenesis;  therefore,  though  it  is 
not  known  to  occur  now,  and  has  never  been 
known  to  occur,  it  must  have  taken  place. 
Than  which  I  know  of  no  more  glaring  case 
of  begging  the  question. 

To  most  minds,  the  concessions  that  living 
matter  cannot  come  out  of  the  non-living,  and 
that  life  only  appeared  when  the  globe  came 
to  be  fitted  to  maintain  it,  proves,  as  far  as  is 
possible,  its  introduction  by  a  power  that  is 
not  of  earth. 

This  is  apparently  conceded  by  the  one  who 
above  all  others  deserves  to  be  called  the  fa- 
ther of  modern  evolution, — the  ldte  Charles 
Darwin.  For  in  his  epochal  book, — "  The  Or- 
igin of  Species," — in  which  he  formulates  his 
law  of  natural  selection,  he  expressly  assumes 
the  creation  of  one  or  a  few  low  forms  of  life, 
and  only  claims  to  show  how  from  them  all 
the  others  have  proceeded.  Whatever  were 
Darwin's  personal  beliefs, — and  we  have  rea- 
son to  think  he  was  not  disinclined  to  entirely 
eliminate  God  and  the  supernatural  from  the 
universe, — his  writings  stamp  him  as  a  the- 
istic  evolutionist.  He  no  where  seeks  to  ac- 
count for  the  origin  of  matter,  or  life,  or  intel- 
ligence, but  only  for  their  development  in 
divergent  forms  when  once  existent. 


of  evolution:  45 

Notwithstanding  this  admission,  the  Dar- 
winian theory  is  really  the  stronghold  of  ma- 
terialistic and  agnostic  evolution,  since  it  is 
the  nearest  approach  to  anything  like  a  plau- 
sible accounting  for  the  existing  forms  of  the 
vegetable  and  animal  kingdoms,  apart  from 
Divine  creation  and  superintendence. 

Darwin  formulated  a  law,  which  evidently 
has  been  widely  operative  in  diversifying 
natural  forms,  and  serves  to  explain  beauti- 
fully and  simply  very  much  that  character- 
izes existing  species  alike  of  plants  and 
animals.  Mechanical  evolutionists  hastened, 
as  soon  as  promulgated,  to  use  it  as  the  mas- 
ter key  that  unlocks  every  mystery  and  ex- 
plains every  difficulty  in  their  hypothesis,  and 
while  to-day  abating  much  in  their  claims, 
they  yet  have  to  rest  upon  it  as  the  only 
formulated  cause  of  the  wide  diversity  in 
nature. 

Of  such  importance  is  this  theory,  in  its  re- 
lation to  the  wider  theory  of  evolution,  that, 
at  the  risk  of  wearying  you  by  traversing  all- 
too-familiar  ground,  I  must  dwell  briefly  up- 
on it. 

The  postulates  on  which  it  rests  are  well- 
nigh  axiomatic  for  their  truthfulness.  The 
first  is  the  fact,  that  the  increase  of  "iving 
forms  on  the  earth  is  in  a  geometrical  ratT'o, 


46  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

so  that  in  a  very  few  generations  the  num- 
ber becomes  far  in  excess  of  the  means  for 
their  support.  The  progeny  of  a  single  pair 
would  suffice  in  a  few  centuries  to  overstock 
the  whole  earth.  As  the  consequence  of  such 
a  tendency  in  plants  and  animals,  there  is  a 
struggle  for  existence,  in  which  the  weakest 
perish,  and  the  strongest  survive;  by  the 
weakest  being  meant  those  least  fitted,  and  by 
the  strongest  those  best  fitted  to  maintain  the 
struggle.  Hence  the  law  is  appropriately 
called  "survival  of  the  fittest."  Now  the  fit- 
ness does  not  inhere  only  or  chiefly  in  strength, 
but  rather  in  adaptation  to  environment,  so  that 
the  advantageous  peculiarities  which  enable 
any  particular  form  to  survive  are  many  and 
varied.  It  may  be  physical  strength,  or  some 
peculiarity  of  claw  or  teeth,  which  makes  more 
certain  the  capture  of  its  prey,  or  it  may  be 
some  defensive  adaptation  by  which  a  natural 
enemy  is  more  certainly  eluded. 

The  survivors  in  this  struggle  are  those  who 
possess  the  peculiarities  best  fitted  to  their  sur- 
roundings. Thus  far  the  theory  is  neces- 
sarily accepted — its  truth  is  axiomatic.  But 
to  make  up  the  law  of  natural  selection,  by 
which  the  origin  of  species  is  to  be  explained, 
another  postulate  is  put  forth  and  maintained 
by  Darwin  with  a  wealth  and  skill  of  illustra- 


OF  EVOLUTION'.  47 

tion  and  argument,  that  cannot  but  call  forth 
admiration.  This  is  the  tendency  of  plants  and 
animals  to  vary  despite  the  general  law  of  here- 
dity that  like  produces  like.  This  is  well  seen 
inplantsandanimalsunderdomestication;and 
by  the  careful  cherishing  of  desirable  varia- 
tions many  new  and  profitable  varieties  have 
been  perpetuated.  This  has  been  done  by 
human  intelligence  co-ordinating  the  laws  of 
heredity  and  variability.  Darwin  claims  that 
it  is  done  in  nature  by  the  same  laws,  with- 
out superintending  intelligence,  that  varia- 
tions are  continually  occurring,  slight,  it  may 
be,  but  yet  sufficient  to  decide  the  issue  in  the 
severity  of  the  struggle  for  existence,  and 
where  the  variation  is  profitable  it  secures 
the  survival  of  its  possessor. 

Thus  ever  wider  and  wider  variations  arise 
and  are  perpetuated,  and  constitute  what  we 
call  Species.  All  this  occurs,  not  as  the  theist 
claims  by  a  process  divinely  superintended  and 
governed,  but  of  necessity. 

From  one  or  a  few  simple  forms  of  life  all 
the  present  forms  have  sprung,  through  the 
operation  of  this  law,  without  intervention  or 
control  by  God.  It  was  put  forth  as  having 
universal  and  unlimited  potency. 

No  one  doubts  that  there  has  been  such  a 
thing  as  natural  selection,  in  the  sense  that 


48  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

certain  forms,  because  of  inheriting  valuable, 
advantageous  peculiarities,  have  been  thereby 
marked  out,  selected,  fitted  to  survive;  the 
whole  question  turns  upon  how  extensively 
and  potentially  the  law  has  operated. 

Is  there  or  is  there  not  a  limit  to  variabil- 
ity? Does  the  proposed  law  suffice  for  the 
explanation  of  all, — as  well  as  of  some, — of  the 
past  and  present  diversity  of  form  and  function? 
For  more  than  twenty  years  the  controversy 
on  this  point  has  been  waged,  and  though  the 
final  verdict  may  not  have  been  reached,  there 
are  certain  conclusions  that  can  be  regarded  as 
settled. 

One  is  that  the  potency,  whatever  it  may 
be,  of  Darwin's  law,  is  more  or  less  restricted. 
Alone  and  by  itself  it  fails  at  many  points  to 
satisfactorily  account  for  crucial  facts. 

As  an  explanation  of  necessary  evolution  it 
has  to  be  supplemented  again  and  again,  and 
collocated  with  other  and  unknown  forces  and 
laws.  This  is  conceded  on  all  sides.  Darwin, 
in  the  fifth  edition  of  "The  Origin  of  Spe- 
cies,"— issued  ten  years  after  the  first — limits 
the  operation  of  the  law  in  these  words — "  I 
am  convinced,  ...  it  has  been  the  most  im- 
portant, but  not  the  exclusive  means  of  modi- 
fication." He  was  compelled  to  invoke  new 
factors  to  meet  its  deficiencies,  as  sexual  se- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  49 

lection  and  pangenesis,  and  then  leave  much 
to  be  accounted  for  by  unknown  laws.3 

Alfred  R.  Wallace,  who  propounded  the 
principle  contemporaneously  with  Darwin, 
has  always  held  it  as  of  only  limited  ap- 
plicability, and  has  well  pointed  out  its  fail- 
ure when  applied  to  man. 

St.  George  Mivart,  of  equal  rank  with  Dar- 
win, Wallace,  Huxley  and  Tyndall  as  a  scien- 
tist, though  an  evolutionist,  remands  natural 
selection  to  a  subordinative  role,  and  not  only 
asserts,  but  is  generally  conceded  to  prove,  that 
"it  requires  to  be  supplemented  by  the  action 
of  some  other  natural  law  or  laws  as  yet  un- 
discovered. '  Natural  selection '  is  insufficient, 
both  on  account  of  the  residuary  phenomena 
it  fails  to  explain,  and  on  account  of  certain 
other  phenomena  which  seem  actually  to  con- 
flict with  that  theory.1'4 

Huxley,  whose  lucid  exposition  of  the  theory 
served  more  even  than  Darwin's  labored  book 
to  give  it  popular  currency  and  acceptance, 
concedes,  in  the  last  edition  of  the  Encyclo- 
pcedia  Britannica,  "How  far  'natural  selec- 
tion' suffices  for  the  production  of  species  re- 
mains to  be  seen".  .  .  "it  must  play  a  great 

s  See  "Descent  of  Man,"  Vol.  I.,  p.  146. 
4  "  Genesis  of  Species,"  pp.  17,  33,  257.     Compare  also, 
"The  Cat,"  Chap.  XV. 


50  TRUTHS  AND    UNTRUTHS 

part  in  the  sorting  out  of  varieties  into  those 
which  are  transitory  and  those  which  are 
permanent."  .  .  .  "The  causes  and  condi- 
tions of  variation  have  yet  to  be  thoroughly 
explored;  and  the  importance  of  natural  se- 
lection will  not  be  impaired,  even  if  further 
inquiries  should  prove  that  variability  is  defi- 
nite, and  is  determined,  in  certain  directions, 
rather  than  in  others,  by  conditions  inherent 
in  that  which  varies."5 

One  of  the  latest  important  works  that  has 
appeared  is  "The  Theories  of  Darwin,"  by 
Eudolph  Schmid,  in  which,  in  presenting  "the 
present  state  of  the  Darwinian  theories,"  the 
author  says  (p.  107) — "In  summing  up  all  we 
have  said  about  theories  of  descent,  of  evo- 
lution, and  of  selection,  we  still  find  all  the 
solutions  of  the  scientific  problems  to  be 
hypotheses,  but  hypotheses  of  very  different 
value.  The  least  valuable  is  the  selection 
theory.  It  possesses  the  merit  of  having 
started  the  whole  question  of  the  origin  of 
species;  it  may  explain  subordinary  develop- 
ments; natural  selection  may  have  co-operated 
as  a  regulator  in  the  whole  progress  and  the 
whole  preservation  of  organic  life.  It  seems 
certain  however,  according  to  Ed.  Von  Hart- 

s  Article  "Evolution,"  Encyc.  Brit,  Vol.  VIII.,  p.  657. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  51 

man,  that  the  impelling  principle  which  called 
new  species  into  existence  lay  or  originated 
in  the  organisms  and  did  not  approach  from 
without.  This  seems  to  be  confirmed  more 
and  more  decidedly  with  every  new  step  of 
exact  investigation  as  well  as  reflection." 

These  latest  conclusions  of  science  as  to  the 
insufficiency  of  Darwin's  theory,  or  "  natural 
selection,"  to  explain  the  origin  of  species, 
these  concurrent  testimonies  as  to  its  having 
but  subordinate  efficiency  in  moulding  the 
forms  of  life,  make  it  unnecessary  to  devote 
more  than  a  casual  glance  at  the  points 
wherein  it  breaks  down.  The  grounds  for 
denying  it  the  potency  at  first  claimed  are 
chiefly  these — 

1st.  The  preponderating  evidence  is  very 
strong  in  favor  of  a  limit  to  the  variabil- 
ity of  species,  and  against  the  proposition 
on  which  the  whole  Darwinian  theory  is 
founded, — that  there  is  no  essential  differ- 
ence between  varieties  and  species.  The  fact 
that  varieties,  however  they  may  differ — and 
in  structure  they  do  differ  more  widely  than 
many  species — are  universally  fertile  with  each 
other;  and  that,  in  all  the  wide  variation  intro- 
duced by  domestication,  infertility  has  not  been 
produced;  joined  to  the  fact  that  species  when 
crossed  universally  manifest  this,  the  peculiar- 


52  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

ity  of  hybridism,  combine  to  prove  that  there 
is  an  essential  distinction  between  the  two. 

This  distinction  has  not  yet  been  broken 
down,  and  though  the  theory  has  made  it  ex- 
ceeding probable  that  many  real  varieties  are 
reckoned  as  species,  and  the  boundaries  of  true 
species  must  be  very  largely  extended,  it  has 
not  demonstrated  that  there  is  no  real  differ- 
ence between  them.  Facts  prove,  as  Huxley 
concedes,  that,  coupled  with  wide  morphologi- 
cal or  structural  changes,  there  exists  great 
fixity  of  physiological  or  functional  character- 
istics. Indeed,  under  domestication,  a  limit 
is  ultimately  reached  beyond  which  variation 
cannot  be  carried;  and  it  is  demonstrable  that 
it  is  equally  so  in  nature,  and  that  there  the 
limit  is  much  sooner  reached.  In  view  of  this, 
the  widening  of  specific  limits  seems  all  that 
can  be  justly  claimed  for  the  theory. 

If  specific  modifications  have  been  by  descent, 
as  it  seems  probable  that  they  have  been,  it  has 
been  regulated,  not  by  this  but  by  unformulated 
laws,  and  may  as  well  as  otherwise  have  been 
due  to  creative  power  exerted  directly  on  the 
germs. 

2d.  The  testimony  of  the  geological  record 
opposes  the  theory  in  many  points.  The 
theory  implies  not  only  a  general  upward 
gradation  in  plants  and  animals,  an  advance 


OF  EVOLUTION.  53 

from  the  lower  to  the  higher,  as  we  indeed 
find,  but  the  same  advance  in  particular 
families  or  types,  which  confessedly  we  do 
not  find;  since  particular  families  began  ap- 
parently in  their  higher  rather  than  their 
lower  members.  The  theory  demands  prog- 
ress by  slow  gradual  modifications;  the 
geological  record  seems  to  indicate  leaps: 
many  forms  of  life  have  appeared  suddenly 
on  the  scene  and  unconnected  with  previous 
forms.  According  to  the  theory  there  ought 
to  have  been  many  transitional  forms;  the 
record  affords  scarcely  any.  Those  which 
have  been  adduced  as  the  assumed  progeni- 
tors of  the  horse,  and  winged  reptiles,  while 
lending  some  additional  weight  perhaps  to 
the  theory  of  evolution,  viz.,  that  present 
forms  have  been  reached  by  successive  modi- 
fications of  previous  ones,  do  not  materially 
strengthen  the  theory  of  natural  selection. 
While  it  still  remains  an  almost  insuperable 
difficulty  in  that  theory,  that,  in  the  very 
strata  which  afford  the  most  continuous 
records  for  the  longest  periods,  there  is  an 
entire  absence  of  such  forms,  as  modification 
by  such  a  law  would  call  for.  It  is  still  a 
fact  that  the  main  types  of  the  invertebrates 
appear  almost  contemporaneously  and  without 
any  traceable  intermediate  forms. 


54  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

3d.  The  enormous  lapse  of  time  required  for 
the  development  of  existing  species,  is,  fur- 
ther, an  insuperable  bar  to  its  acceptance. 
Darwin  says,  "Natural  selection  acts  solely 
by  accumulating  slight  successive  favorable 
variations;  it  can  produce  no  great  or  sudden 
modification ;  it  can  act  only  by  slow  and  short 
steps."6  Mivart  estimates  that,  by  this  meth- 
od, "  it  would  have  taken  2,500  million  years 
for  the  complete  development  of  the  whole 
animal  kingdom  to  its  present  state."  And 
if  natural  selection  has  been  the  only  method, 
this  is  not  at  all  excessive  in  view  of  the  length 
of  time  it  has  taken  to  differentiate,  say  the 
greyhound  from  the  wolf.  Now  earth,  it  is 
mathematically  demonstrable,  could  not,  ac- 
cording to  the  nebular  hypothesis,  have  been 
the  home  of  life  for  more  than  100,000,000 
years,  some  estimates  say  10,000,000  years, 
and  even  the  longer  period  would  scarcely 
suffice  for  the  production  of  the  higher  mam- 
mals. 

4th.  The  theory  utterly  fails  to  account  for 
the  incipient  stages  of  organs  and  organisms, 
which,  however  profitable  in  their  perfect  and 
mature  form,  previous  to  that  must  have  been 
useless,  or  even  injurious. 

Mivart,   in  his  "  Genesis  of  Species,"  has 

6  "Origin  of  Species,"  p.  421. 


OF   EVOLUTION.  55 

fully  set  forth  and  illustrated  this  objection, 
and  shown  both  the  utter  impossibility  of  the 
acquisition  of  many  peculiarities  by  any  such 
slow  and  gradual  process,  and  following 
Nageli,  the  mathematical  improbability,  that 
a  modification,  occurring  in  one  or  a  few  in- 
dividuals surrounded  by  others,  would  be 
perpetuated  rather  than  be  lost. 

These  objections  are  recognized  as  fatal  to 
Darwin's  celebrated  theory  as  a  full  and 
satisfactory  account  of  the  origin  of  specific 
differences. 

The  theory  does  serve  however  to  explain 
with  much  plausibility  a  number  of  facts — 
e.  g.,  rudimentary  organs  as  atrophied  through 
disuse;  the  phenomena  of  mimicry,  —  i.  e., 
close  resemblance  of  certain  plants  or  ani- 
mals to  other  and  perhaps  different  plants 
or  animals,  as  a  safeguard  from  enemies,  and 
hence  an  advantageous  peculiarity  certain  to 
be  perpetuated ;  while  it  fits  in  with  some  of 
the  facts  of  the  geographical  and  geological 
distribution  of  species;  of  the  homology  of 
form  and  function;  and  biological  develop- 
ment. 

We  have  dwelt  thus  upon  the  theory  of 
natural  selection,  since  it  is  the  only  one  of 
which  science  has  as  yet  been  able  to  explain 
the  operation. 


56  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

The  laws  with  which  it  has  co-operated  to 
effect  present  diversity  are  conceded  to  be 
unknown,  and  are  merely  inferred  because 
there  seems  evidence  that  existing  forms  and 
species  have  in  some  way  descended  from 
pre-existent  ones. 

This  the  present  geographical  distribution, 
taken  in  connection  with  geological  remains, 
makes  most  probable.  For  it  is  a  conceded 
fact  that  the  geological  remains  in  many  cases 
show  the  prevalence  in  geological  ages  of  the 
same  typical  forms  as  are  found  in  the  same 
localities  to-day.  Thus  in  Australia  is  found 
a  particular  fauna,  and  among  those  peculiar 
to  it,  and  indeed  found  nowhere  else,  are  the 
kangaroos  and  other  pouched  beasts,  and  the 
same  type  of  creatures  is  found  in  its  geologi- 
cal remains.  The  same  fact  is  true  of  the 
very  peculiar  animals  of  the  sloth  and  arma- 
dillo type — found  alone  in  South  America. 

Alfred  R.  Wallace  has  collated  many  cor- 
roborative illustrations  of  this  feature  of 
geographical  distribution,  and  further  shown 
that  the  diversity  of  animals  and  plants  on 
islands  is  directly  proportionate  to  the  degree 
of  ease  with  which  they  can  have  passed 
from  one  to  the  other.  These  considerations, 
with  some  of  those  already  referred  to,  as 
being  best  explicable  on  the  supposition  of 


OF  EVOLUTION.  57 

genetic  relationship,  lend  much  strength  to 
the  hypothesis  of  an  evolution  of  specific  dif- 
ferences. We  have  seen  that  Darwin's  theory 
does  not  by  itself  explain  them,  that  there 
must  be  supposed  other  laws,  yet  unknown 
and  unformulated,  supplemental  and  co-op- 
erative, to  account  for  the  facts.  The  very 
fact  that  different  laws  have  conspired  unto 
the  result;  that  the  relation  of  plants  to 
insects,  of  many  a  species  to  other  species,  is  one 
of  mutual  dependence;  that  the  outcome  of  the 
struggle  for  existence  has  fitted  the  earth  to 
be  a  home  for  man;  proves  that  there  must 
have  been  a  co-ordination  and  collocation  of 
laws  and  efficient  causes  throughout  the  pro- 
cess, and  this  we  cannot  conceive  of,  apart 
from  an  all-wise  and  almighty  co-ordinator 
and  ruler. 

Mechanical,  necessary  evolution  fails  as 
signally  to  explain  the  origin  of  species  as 
it  does  to  account  for  the  introduction  of  life, 
and  the  beginning  of  the  world.  These  all  are 
inexplicable  by  any  other  evolution  than  that 
which  has  back  of  it  a  living,  personal  God, 
creating  and  governing  all  things  for  His  own 
ends;  and  such  evolution,  subsequent  to  its 
beginnings,  differs  not  from  what  in  theology 
we  call  Providence. 


58  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

In  reviewing  the  ground  we  have  traversed 
in  this  lecture,  we  see  that  materialistic  and 
agnostic  evolution,  in  seeking  to  account  for 
the  earth  and  life  by  causes  or  forces  inherent 
in  itself,  is  necessitated  to  bridge  the  chasms 
between  the  non-existent  and  the  existent, 
between  nothing  and  matter,  and  matter  and 
force,  between  the  not-living  and  the  living, 
and  between  the  widely  separated  forms  of 
vegetable  and  animal  life.  We  have  seen 
that  it  fails  in  each  and  every  instance.  We 
could  equally  demand  of  it,  to  explain  still 
higher  steps  in  the  necessary  progression. 
Whence  sensation,  intelligence,  consciousness? 
By  what  principle  immanent  in  nature  has 
man,  with  his  reason  and  conscience,  self- 
determining  will  and  spiritual  intuitions, 
been  evolved  ?  These  difficulties  are  as  in- 
explicable, by  such  evolution,  as  those  into 
the  consideration  of  which  we  have  entered. 

The  only  rational  conclusion,  the  only  con- 
sistent account  of  earth  and  its  contents,  is 
an  evolution  back  of  which  is  a  creator  and 
a  providence  in  one  person.  For  the  origin  of 
matter,  of  force,  of  life,  of  intelligence,  of  man. — 
a  creator :  for  the  progressive  process  by  which, 
under  laws  and  secondary  causes  ordained  by 
the  Creator  and  co-ordinated  by  Him,  earth 
has  become  what  it  is, — a  Providence. 


OF   EVOLUTION.  59 

True  science,  when  it  has  traced  out  the 
history  of  the  earth  and  its  myriad  inhabi- 
tants, when  it  has  mastered  the  wondrous 
connections  and  intimate  relationships  of  its 
phenomena,  and  when,  discerning  herein  the 
presence  of  a  plan,  of  thought,  intention,  pur- 
pose, it  asks  the  questions,  whence  ?  and  why  ? 
will  find  its  only  answer  to  be : — God. 


LECTURE  THIRD. 


EVOLUTION  AND   MAN. 


The  advent  of  man  with  powers  bespeaking 
a  different  order  of  being  from  any  below  him, 
demands  even  more  than  the  incoming  of  life, 
sensation,  and  intelligence,  the  interposition 
of  an  omniscient  and  omnipresent  Creator;  and 
this  is  strictly  accordant  with  a  divinely  co- 
ordinated and  controlled  evolution.  Mechan- 
ical evolution,  on  the  contrary,  is  constrained 
to  make  man,  as  everything  below  him,  the 
necessary  outcome  of  unconscious  and  unin- 
telligent forces, — merely  the  highest  and  final 
product  of  a  slow  and  constantly  ascending 
natural  selection. 

The  Agnostic  as  much  as  the  Materialist 
must  so  regard  him.  For  let  it  be  admitted 
that  man  is  the  Creation  of  God,  and  has  in 
his  soul  something  that  bespeaks  his  origin 
and  is  akin  to  his  maker,  and  God  ceases  to 
be  the  altogether  unknowable,  and  the  funda- 
mental postulate  of  Agnosticism  is  overthrown. 


TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS.  61 

Agnostic  and  Materialist  therefore  agree  in 
making  man  only  an  evolution  from  the  brute, 
a  survival  from  the  same  stock  as  the  Anthro- 
poid Apes. 

The  difficulties  however  of  such  a  concep- 
tion are  greater  than  at  any  previous  point  in 
the  process. 

They  are  such  as  to  cause  many  an  evolu- 
tionist, as  notably  Alfred  Russell  Wallace,  to 
pause,  and  concede  that  here  mechanical  evo- 
lution fails  and  that  "  a  Superior  Intelligence 
has  guided  the  development  of  man  in  a  defi- 
nite direction  and  for  a  definite  purpose." 

However  efficient  natural  selection  has  been 
in  accounting  for  the  "  Origin  of  Species,"  many 
besides  Wallace  have  been  constrained  to  con- 
cede its  inability  to  explain  the  "Descent  of 
Man."  Wallace's  arguments  on  this  point 
have  never  yet  been  satisfactorily  met.  He 
urges  that  natural  selection  does  not  account 
for  the  size  of  man's  brain,  so  much  in  excess 
of  the  highest  apes,  and  of  his  own  need  when 
but  a  slight  remove  from  his  brute  ances- 
try. It  cannot  account  for  the  loss  of  such 
useful  peculiarities  as  a  hairy  covering  for  his 
back,  and  the  prehensile  character  of  the 
feet.  Nor  can  it  explain  the  latent  and  long 
unused  capabilities  of  the  human  hand  and 
voice,  and  the  acquisition  of  man's  character- 


62  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

istic  mental  and  spiritual  faculties.  These  are 
difficulties,  we  may  add,  not  only  in  the  way 
of  natural  selection,  but  of  any  theory  of  unin- 
telligent and  mechanical  evolution. 

The  hiatus  between  apes  and  man  is  so  great 
as  to  be  a  serious  stumbling-block  in  the  way 
of  any  theory  of  gradual  modification.  If 
man  and  the  ape  have  had  at  a  remote  period 
a  common  ancestor,  where  are  the  many  inter- 
mediate and  transitional  forms  that  must  have 
existed  ?  It  is  conceded  that  man  is  the  latest 
and  possibly  the  final  outcome  of  the  long  pro- 
cess. However  far  back  his  advent,  compared 
with  the  other  forms  of  life,  it  is  recent,  and 
from  his  first  appearance  the  earth-record  is 
measurably  complete.  Now  this  record  speaks 
of  no  such  half  men  and  half  apes,  as,  on  such 
a  theory,  we  have  a  right  to  expect.  On  the 
contrary  the  earliest  human  remains  show 
that  man  was  then  no  whit  less  endowed  with 
cranial  capacity  than  the  man  of  to-day.  Then 
as  now  the  size  of  brain  does  not  perhaps  pos- 
itively decide  whether  the  condition  was  one 
of  savagery  or  civilization,  but  it  does  pos- 
itively negative  that  it  was  ape-like.  To  the 
same  purport  is  the  fact,  that  no  man  has  ever 
been  found  so  embruted  or  sunken  in  savagery 
as  to  be  without  capacity  for  spiritual  quicken- 
ing and  development,  a  capacity  no  ape  has 


OF  EVOLUTION.  63 

ever  manifested,  and  this  proves  man's  intel- 
ligence to  be  of  a  different  kind  from  that  of 
the  brutes.  In  fact  it  must  be  granted  that 
if  brute  instinct  be  of  the  same  order  as  hu- 
man intelligence,  then,  as  Sir  John  Lubbock 
justly  says,  if  "anthropoid  apes  approach 
nearer  to  man  in  bodily  structure  than  do  any 
other  animals,  it  must  be  admitted  that  ants 
have  a  fair  claim  to  rank  next  to  man  in  the 
scale  of  intelligence."  * 

In  view  of  this,  we  ask,  are  we  more  en- 
titled to  look  for  the  missing  link  in  the  do- 
main between  man  and  the  monkey,  than 
between  man  and  the  ant?  Is  it  bodily 
form,  or  intelligence,  that  is  man's  chief  char- 
acteristic ?  In  either  case,  however,  the  chasm 
is  immense  and  cannot  be  closed. 

The  evidence  is  cumulative  that  serves  to 
disprove  the  postulate  of  materialistic  and 
agnostic  evolution,  that  man  has  been  evolved 
from  the  brute. 

Just  as  to  account  for  matter  and  force  and 
life  a  divine  interposition  is  needful,  so  is  it 
even  more  essential,  in  order  to  account  for 
man,  possessed  as  he  is  of  a  soul  with  moral 
attributes,  and  a  higher  order  of  intelligence 
than  that  of  the  brutes. 

There  are  two  inferences  necessarily  drawn 
1  Lubbock's  "Ants,  Bees,  and  Wasps,  "'p.  1. 


64  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

from  the  hypothesis  of  mechanical  evolution 
that  deserve  especial  consideration,  and  all  the 
move  because  it  is  claimed,  that  they  are  estab- 
lished by  independent  and  positive  evidence 
and  hence  are  put  forth  as  not  merely  consis- 
tent with  man's  descent  from  the  brute,  but 
positive  arguments  in  favor  of  such  an  origin. 

These  inferences  are: — Maris  vast  antiquity; 
and  his  low  primitive  condition,  only  slightly 
in  advance  of  his  supposed  brutish  ancestry. 

We  readily  see,  that  the  establishment  of 
these  postulates  is  essential  to  the  mainte- 
nance of  any  theory  of  mechanical  or  necessary 
evolution ;  if  they  be  overthrown  or  weakened 
by  just  so  much  is  the  entire  hypothesis 
discredited.  To  the  establishment  of  these 
propositions  therefore  have  been  given  great 
industry  of  research  and  wide  learning.  It 
becomes  us  to  examine  them  with  great  care- 
fulness and  candor. 

In  what  remains  of  this  lecture  we  will 
consider  the  question  of  Maris  Antiquity;  and 
reserve  for  our  next,  the  equally  important 
and  closely  connected  question  of  his  prim- 
itive condition, — the  origin  of  his  civilization. 

In  consistency  with  the  claim  that  "man  is 
descended  from  a  hairy  quadruped,  furnished 
with  a  tail  and  pointed  ears,  probably  arboreal 
in  its  habits  and  an  inhabitant  of  the  Old 


OF  EVOLUTION.  65 

World,  and  classed  among  the  Quadrumana  as 
surely  as  would  the  common  and  still  more 
ancient  progenitor  of  the  Old  and  New  World 
monkeys,"2  he  must  be  regarded  as  coining 
on  the  stage  of  earth  not  only  in  a  condition 
of  savagery  lower  than  any  now  known,  but 
at  a  time  most  remote  from  the  distant  period 
to  which  the  dawn  of  history  carries  us  back. 
On  the  hypothesis  of  slow  gradual  modifica- 
tions, one  hundred  or  even  five  hundred  thou- 
sand years  would  not  be  an  excessive  estimate 
of  his  age  on  earth,  if  it  be  measured  by  the 
ratio  of  his  progress  in  the  four  or  five  thou- 
sand years  covered  by  the  records  of  history. 

But  we  will  not  concern  ourselves  with  this 
inferential  style  of  reasoning.  Fond  as  the 
advocates  of  a  great  antiquity  are  of  using  it, 
it  carries  no  weight  unless  mechanical  evo- 
lution itself  be  accepted,  and  that  too  in  a 
form  which  admits  of  no  modifications  or 
progression  except  by  a  process,  as  slow, 
gradual  and  steady,  as  that  by  natural  selec- 
tion. To  argue  antiquity  from  an  assumed 
progression,  at  an  assumed  rate,  from  sav- 
agery to  civilization,  from  the  ape-like  an- 
cestor, to  the  cultured  descendant,  is  a  mere 
begging  of  the  question. 

The  issue  is  capable  of  being  tried  in  the 
2  Darwin's  "Descent  of  Man,"  Vol.  II,  p.  372. 


66  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

light  of  facts.  It  is  a  question  of  evidence. 
Do  the  facts  as  far  as  ascertained  prove  the 
great  antiquity  of  man  ? 

We  will  proceed  to  interrogate  the  evidences, 
but  before  doing  so,  it  may  not  be  amiss  to 
state  that  latterly  there  has  been  in  deference 
to  facts,  a  great  curtailing  of  man's  age,  from 
the  hundreds  of  thousands,  if  not  millions  of 
years  claimed  for  it,  on  the  ground  that  he 
has  become  what  he  is  by  the  slow  process 
of  natural  selection.  Even  Ha^ckel  has  con- 
ceded that  the  claims  at  first  advanced  were 
probably  excessive,  and  admits  that  a  modest 
minimum  of  twenty  .thousand  years  may  prove 
all  that  the  facts  will  warrant.  E.  B.  Tylor 
in  his  article  on  "  Anthropology  "  in  Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica,  uses  equally  moderate  lan- 
guage,— as,  e.  g.,  "from  twenty  to  one  hundred 
thousand  years  may  fairly  be  taken  as  a  mini- 
mum," the  evidence  of  prehistoric  remains, 
requires  "an  antiquity  of  at  least  tens  of 
thousands  of  years."  The  development  of 
culture  and  language  "  necessitates  that  to 
the  four  or  five  thousand  years  to  which  the 
ancient  civilizations  of  Egypt,  Babylon,  and 
China  date  back,  a  probably  much  greater 
length  of  time  must  be  added."  This  is  a 
marked  abbreviation  of  the  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands that  were  at  one  time  claimed. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  67 

This  bringing  down  the  sojourn  of  man  on 
earth  to  somewhere  within  from  double  to 
quadruple  the  time  usually  allowed  his  his- 
tory is  necessitated  by  any  temperate  weigh- 
ing of  the  facts  relied  upon  to  prove  his  age. 
Though  his  advent  may  be  remanded  back 
to  a  geological  period,  it  is  to  the  period 
confessedly  the  topmost  of  the  series.  He 
belongs  to  Cenozoic  time, — the  Quarternary 
age, — the  geologically  Recent  period.  There 
have  been  frequent  announcements  that  evi- 
dences of  his  existence  in  the  Pliocene  and 
even  Miocene  period  of  the  Tertiary  had  been 
found,  but  more  careful  examination  has  ever 
disproved  the  claim.  So  that  no  recognized 
authority  assigns  to  man  an  antiquity  older 
than  the  Pleistocene  of  Lyell,  and  the  Middle 
Quarternary  or  Recent  period  of  other  geol- 
ogists. There  are  those  who  indeed  expect 
the  evidence  of  greater  age  will  be  found, 
but  the  fact  remains  that  it  has  not  yet  been 
adduced. 

The  sciences  to  be  interrogated  as  to  man's 
antiquity  are  three:  Geology,  Prehistoric  Ar- 
chaeology, and  the  Science  of  Culture.  And 
the  evidence  adduced  correspondingly  falls 
under  three  heads: — 1.  Facts  which  concern 
the  geological  position  of  human  remains. 
2.    Facts    which    respect    man's    association, 


68  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

and  contemporaneousness  with  certain  ex- 
tinct mammals.  3.  Facts  which  respect  his 
race  characteristics,  diversities  of  speech,  and 
the  origin  and  growth  of  civilization. 

We  will  as  briefly  as  possible  examine  the 
argument. 

Within  the  last  fifty  years,  and  more  par- 
ticularly the  last  twenty-five,  facts  have 
been  multiplying  tending  to  connect  man 
with  a  past  geological  epoch,  and  an  extinct 
fauna.  Very  few  fossilized  crania,  or  bones 
of  man  have  been  found — and  such  as  have 
been  discovered  are  conceded  to  have  afforded 
very  slight  evidence  as  to  his  antiquity. 

Their  age  as  inferable  from  their  posi- 
tion, rests  upon  geological  considerations, 
and  as  to  these  there  is  no  such  agreement 
as  to  require  the  supposition  of  any  very 
great  antiquity. 

The  evidence  as  to  age  on  the  hypothesis 
of  a  kinship  to  the  brutes,  equally  breaks 
down  in  respect  to  the  crania  that  are  con- 
fessedly the  most  ancient,  as  notably  the 
Engis  and  Neanderthal  skulls.  As  to  the 
first,  Huxley  says:  "There  is  no  mark  of 
degradation  about  any  part  of  its  structure. 
It  is  in  fact  a  fair  average  human  skull, 
which  might  have  belonged  to  a  philosopher, 
or  might  have  contained  the  thoughtless  brain 


OF  EVOLUTION.  69 

of  a  savage."  As  to  the  latter,  he  says,  while 
in  some  characteristics  "the  most  pithecoid 
of  human  crania  yet  discovered,  .  .  .  its  ca- 
pacity may  be  estimated  at  about  seventy- 
five  inches,  which  is  the  average  capacity  for 
Polynesian  or  Hottentot  skulls."  And  "in 
no  sense  can  it  be  regarded  as  the  remains 
of  a  human  being  intermediate  between  men 
and  apes." 

In  the  light  of  these  oldest  human  remains 
he  declares  "if  any  form  of  the  doctrine  of 
progressive  development  is  correct,  we  must 
extend  by  long  epochs  the  most  liberal  esti- 
mate that  has  yet  been  made  of  the  antiquity 
of  man."3 

The  remains  of  man  which  are  depended 
on  to  prove  his  antiquity  and  condition,  are 
not  his  fossilized  bones  so  much  as  the  fruits 
of  his  skill  and  handiwork,  which  have  sur- 
vived the  destruction  of  time.  It  is  the  posi- 
tion and  relations  of  these  indisputable  relics 
of  his  art,  that  furnish  the  principal  ground 
for  claiming  for  him  a  high  antiquity. 

For  instance,  mingled  with  the  drift,  or  val- 
ley  gravels  of  certain  rivers,  as  the  Somme, 
the  Seine,  and  the  Garonne,  in  France,  and  the 
Thames,  the  Wey  and  the  Ouse  in  England, 

3  Conclusion  of  Huxle3T's  "Man's  Place  in  Nature," 
also  Quatrafages'  "Natural  History  of  Man,"  pp.  83-5. 


70  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

are  found  worked  flints, — the  indubitable  evi- 
dence of  the  existence  of  man  at  the  period  of 
their  deposition. 

Associated  with  these  tools  and  weapons 
of  flint,  are  found  the  bones  of  extinct  mam- 
mals, such  as  the  mammoth,  the  rhinoceros, 
the  hippopotamus,  the  cave  lion  and  bear, 
the  hyena,  etc.,  etc.  Evidences  of  man's  ex- 
istence and  handiwork,  are  also  found  in 
numerous  caves  in  England,  Belgium,  the 
south  of  France,  and  elsewhere.  In  nearly 
all  cases  his  weapons,  and  tools  and  pottery, 
if  not  his  own  bones  are  associated  with  the 
same  or  a  similar  extinct  fauna,  as  is  found 
in  the  flint-bearing  gravels. 

Likewise  in  the  peat-bogs,  particularly  of 
Denmark,  and  in  what  is  known  as  Kjokken 
Moddings,  or  kitchen  refuse,  or  shell, heaps, 
which  are  numerous  and  extensive  at  many 
points  adjacent  the  sea-coast  of  northern  Eu- 
rope, are  found  not  only  the  relics  of  the 
shell-fish  and  animals  on  which  men  lived, 
but  many  of  their  weapons  and  tools,  and 
in  such  order  and  arrangement  as  give  us 
some  idea  of  their  condition  and  mode  of  life 
at  successive  periods. 

Already  at  this  epoch,  however,  man  has 
come  to  have  substantially  the  same  eviron- 
ment  as  in  the  historical  period,  and  has  passed 


OF  EVOLUTION.  71 

out  of  the  geological  epoch.  The  same  re- 
mark applies  to  the  very  interesting  remains 
that  have  been  recovered  from  the  beds  and 
shores  of  the  Swiss  Lakes,  where  prehistoric 
men  had  for  generations  as  a  protection  against 
beasts  of  prey  or  hostile  tribes  of  men,  their 
houses  built  upon  piles  in  the  lakes  and  thus 
easily  isolated  from  the  land.  This  particular 
form  of  dwelling  is  no  evidence  of  antiquity, 
as  similar  structures  are  found  to-day,  where 
among  certain  tribes  considerations  of  con- 
venience or  security  make  them  desirable,  as 
extensively  in  the  northern  parts  of  South 
America,  and  not  infrequently  elsewhere. 

In  Europe  and  Asia  such  structures  were  in 
use  during  the  historical  period,  and  are  men- 
tioned by  Herodotus  in  his  account  of  the 
Ancient  P&onians;  by  Hippocrates,  and  by 
other   ancient  writers.4 

The  remains  recovered  from  the  sites  of  the 
Swiss  Lake  dwellings,  assure  us  that  they  were 
in  use  from  the  stone  age  down  to  the  bronze, 
yea  into  the  iron,  even  to  the  time  of  the 
Eoman  conquests.  The  fauna  was  some  of  it 
different  from  to-day,  but  none  of  it  geological, 

4  As  to  the  use  of  this  form  of  dwelling  iu  historic  and 
even  present  time,  see  Lubbock's  "  Prehistoric  Man,"  pp. 
174-77.  Also  Southall's  "Recent  Origin  of  Man,"  pp. 
156-58,  178-79.     "  Epoch  of  the  Mammoth,"  pp.  40,  58. 


72  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

or  such  as  to  require  the  assumption  of  any 
great  antiquity. 

These  several  classes  of  remains  furnish  all 
the  direct  geological  or  prehistoric  evidence 
there  is  for  man's  great  antiquity.  It  remains 
for  us  to  examine  the  arguments  built  upon 
them,  and  ascertain  whether  it  is  a  necessary 
conclusion  that  these  prehistoric  men  lived  so 
many  thousands  of  years  antecedent  to  the 
dawn  of  history. 

It  is  readily  granted  that  man  was  present 
in  Europe  while  yet  large  portions  of  it  were 
feeling  the  influence  of  the  last  glacier  period, 
that  he  lived  in  a  climate  and  among  a  flora 
and  fauna  markedly  different  from  the  present, 
that  he  carried  on  the  struggle  for  existence 
amid  difficulties  to  which  his  descendants  are 
strangers.  We  accept  this  to  be  the  evidence 
of  the  river  gravels  and  the  caves;  though  the 
remains  of  human  art  and  of  the  extinct  mam- 
mals have  suffered  so  much  of  dislocation  and 
mixture  by  watery  currents  and  other  agencies, 
that  the  proof  of  contemporaneousness  can  be 
scarcely  regarded  as  conclusive.  Dismissing 
this  doubt,  however,  the  question  of  age  turns 
upon  how  long  a  time  has  been  necessary  to 
effect  the  changes  that  have  taken  place. 

When  were  the  flint-bearing  gravels  of  the 
rivers  deposited?     How  long,  since  man  was 


OF   EVOLUTION.  73 

at  least  an  occasional  occupant  of  the  caves, 
and  the  contemporary  of  the  mammoth,  the 
reindeer,  mid  cave  bear?  How  much  time 
must  be  allowed  for  the  changes  in  configur- 
ation of  land  and  in  climate  that  have  taken 
place  ?  The  answer  to  these  questions  will 
depend  altogether  on  the  views  we  take  as  to 
the  kind  and  degree  of  the  forces  by  which 
these  changes  have  been  wrought.  The  ad- 
vocates for  a  very  long  period,  with  Sir  Chas. 
Lyell  at  their  head,  are  without  exception 
uniformitarians,  i.  e.,  they  assume  that  geo- 
logical changes  have  been  wrought  by  the 
same  forces,  not  only,  as  are  operating  to-day, 
but  by  these  forces  operating  in  the  same  way, 
and  with  substantially  the  same  energy  as  at 
present. 

It  is  by  this  convenient  assumption,  that, 
learning  the  ratio  per  year  or  century  of  any 
change  now  going  on,  the  time  requisite  for 
the  work  accomplished  can  be  readily  reckoned. 

Thus  Sir  Charles  Lyell  reasons  in  respect  to 
parts  of  the  shores  of  Norway.  They  are  found 
to  be  rising  at  the  rate  of  say  two  feet  and  a 
half  in  a  century,  therefore  where  they  have 
been  upheaved  to  an  altitude  of  six  hundred 
feet  it  must  have  required  a  period  of  twenty- 
four  thousand  years.  So  too  the  time  it  has 
taken  to  form    the   alluvial  shores   and   the 


74  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

delta  of  the  Mississippi,  or  the  Nile,  may  be 
calculated  by  ascertaining  the  amount  of  sedi- 
ment that  is  each  year  carried  down  by  their 
waters,  and  dividing  by  it  the  alluvial  mass; 
thus  assuming  the  delta  of  the  Nile,  for  exam- 
ple, to  have  grown  at  the  rate  of  three  inches 
and  a  half  in  a  century,  it  would  have  taken 
several  hundred  centuries  to  have  accumulated 
the  many  feet  that  make  up  its  present  thick- 
ness. On  the  same  principle,  Huxley  assigns 
ten  thousand  years,  and  others  three  to  four 
times  as  many,  as  necessary  to  have  produced 
the  gorge  below  Niagara  Falls.  The  mighty 
rush  of  water  is  cutting  away  the  rock  at  the 
rate  of  from  one  to  three  feet  per  year:  it  is 
therefore  a  simple  mathematical  calculation 
to  ascertain  how  long  it  has  taken  to  wear 
away  the  six  miles  of  ravine  that  lie  below  the 
present  Falls. 

It  is  by  calculations  such  as  these  that  the 
date  of  the  river-gravel  and  cave  men  is  sought 
to  be  ascertained. 

As  to  the  flint  implements  of  the  Somme 
Valley,  their  age  is  calculated  by  estimating 
how  long  it  must  have  taken  for  the  beds  of 
gravel  rising  from  the  chalk  fully  one  hun- 
dred feet  in  places,  to  have  been  formed,  on 
the  supposition  that  every  change  has  been 
wrought  by  the  agency  of  the  present  river, 


OF  EVOLUTION.  75 

flowing  indeed  at  a  higher  level  and  with  some 
greater  volume,  but  in  other  respects  no  more 
potent  to  work  changes  than  at  present. 

The  calculation  begins  by  estimating  the  age 
of  a  deposit  of  peat  about  thirty  feet  in  thick- 
ness, which  overlays,  and  is  more  recent  than, 
the  gravel.  The  age  of  this  has  been  com- 
puted in  this  way.  At  about  eighteen  inches 
from  the  surface  have  been  found  several  flat 
dishes  of  Roman  pottery,  from  which  it  is 
inferred  that  the  peat  has  only  grown  about 
eighteen  inches  in  perhaps  eighteen  hundred 
years,  at  which  ratio  of  deposition  the  age  of 
the  whole  thirty  feet  cannot  be  less  than  three 
to  four  hundred  centuries.  This  conclusion 
led  even  Sir  Charles  Lyell  to  hesitate  to  adopt 
the  proposed  rate  as  a  true  chronometric  scale. 
But  it  is  precisely  on  this  principle  that  such 
calculations  are  made.  If  a  valley  has  been 
worn  down,  it  has  been  at  an  average  erosion 
of  so  many  feet  a  century;  if  the  coast  line  has 
sunken,  it  has  been  at  a  given  ratio  of  de- 
pression ;  if  peat  has  formed,  it  has  been  at  a 
fixed  rate;  and  as  all  these  .features  are  pres- 
ent in  the  Somme  Valley  it  must  have  re- 
quired so  many  millenniums  to  have  brought 
it  to  its  present  condition  out  of  the  original 
chalk.  This  is  manifestly  assuming  that  the 
forces  of  nature  operate  with  a  uniform  ratio 


76  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

of  intensity.  Without  pausing  at  this  point 
to  controvert  the  postulate,  we  may  further 
observe  that  the  age  of  the  cave  men  in  many 
cases  is  ascertained  in  the  same  way.  An 
instance  is  found  in  connection  with  the 
famous  Kent  cavern  of  England. 

Beneath  a  deposit  of  stalagmite  five  feet 
thick  were  found  flint  implements  and  the 
ashes  and  coals  of  a  fire.  At  once  a  time 
measure  was  sought,  and  it  seemed  ready  at 
hand,  for  two  hundred  and  twenty  years  ago 
a  man  had  carved  his  name  upon  the  stalag- 
mite, since  which  time  it  had  grown  only 
one-eighth  of  an  inch,  hence  to  form  the  five 
feet  must  have  required  a  period  of  one  hun- 
dred and  twenty  thousand  years,  and  a  prom- 
inent lecturer  from  England  claimed  before  an 
American  audience  only  a  few  years  ago,  that 
on  this  evidence  we  must  believe  the  man  or 
men  who  built  that  fire  in  Kent  cave  did  it 
more  than  a  hundred  thousand  years  ago. 

Such  results  it  would  seem  must  necessarily 
cast  suspicion  on  the  methods  by  which  they 
are  reached.  We  have  only  instanced  one  or 
two  of  the  many  applications  of  this  principle 
of  uniformity  as  the  basis  for  an  estimate  of 
time.  The  occasion  does  not  admit  or  require 
that  I  should  do  more.  All  such  estimates 
are  utterly  worthless,  since  nothing  is  capable 


OF  EVOLUTION.  77 

of  more  triumphant  demonstration  than  the 
very  converse  of  the  assumed  principle. 

There  is  no  such  thing  in  nature  as  the  as- 
sumed indefinitely  continued  uniform  activity 
of  its  forces. 

It  may  be  on  the  contrary  laid  down  as  a 
law,  that  the  forces  of  nature  have  no  uniform 
ratio  of  activity. 

Peat  is  forming  to-day  as  it  has  in  the  past, 
at  nearly  every  rate  of  growth,  from  one  foot 
a  century  to  one  foot  a  year,  and  how  long  it 
has  taken  any  particular  deposit  to  form  can- 
not be  calculated  on  the  assumption  that  every 
part  has  growth  at  the  same  rate. 

This  is  equally  true  of  stalagmite:  it  may 
grow  as  slowly  as  the  case  cited,  one-eighth 
of  an  inch  in  two  hundred  and  twenty  years; 
it  has  been  known  to  form  as  rapidly  as  one- 
eighth  of  an  inch  in  six  months;  and  because 
at  one  period  the  deposition  is  very  slow, 
it  by  no  means  follows  that  at  another  and 
earlier  it  may  not  have  been  very  rapid.  The 
same  is  true  of  those  wider  and  more  exten- 
sive changes  which  respect  the  elevation,  or 
depression  of  land,  carrying  with  them  as 
they  necessarily  do  important  changes  of 
climate  and  corresponding  variations  of  flora 
and  fauna.  These  are  not,  any  more  than 
the  other  and  minor  modifications,  made  at  a 


78  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

uniform  rate.  A  coast  line  may  rise  for  a 
century  at  the  rate  of  only  a  few  inches  or 
feet  in  all  that  time;  it  may  also  rise  or  sink 
suddenly,  as  has  happened  to  the  coasts  of  India 
and  South  America;  or  again,  in  the  period  of  a 
single  generation  it  may  undergo  most  marked 
changes,  such  as  Darwin  notes  as  having  oc- 
curred in  Chili5  or  as  are  now  taking  place  in 
Hudson's  Bay,  whose  shores  have  risen  several 
feet  in  the  memory  of  man.  And  the  fact 
that  change  has  been  going  on  for  a  century 
at  one  rate,  is  no  criterion  for  judging  what 
the  rate  will  be  in  the  century  to  come  or 
what  it  has  been  in  centuries  past.  The  pres- 
ent popular  school  of  Uniform itarian  geology, 
founded  by  the  lamented  Lyell,  was  a  natural 
and  proper  reaction  from  the  Cataclysmal 
theories  that  had  obscured  the  important  dy- 
namic effects  wrought  by  long  continued 
action  of  existing  forces.  But  just  as  the  day 
of  accounting  by  sweeping  catastrophes  for 
every  geological  change  is  past,  so  we  believe 
will  it  soon  be  with  rigid  Uniformitarianism. 
The  one  extreme  is  as  far  from  the  truth  as 
the  other. 

Other   agencies   have   operated   in   nature 
than  those  we  see  at  work  every  day.     And 
moreover,  these  ordinary  agencies  and  forces 
5  See  "Voyage  of  a  Naturalist,"  p.  310, 


OF  EVOLUTION.  79 

have  wrought  on  a  wider  scale  and  with 
a  greater  energy  than  we  ordinarily  observe. 
Thus  have  changes,  we  doubt  not,  been  many 
times  wrought  more  extensively  and  rapidly 
than  is  conceivable  on  the  uniformitarian 
hypothesis. 

Besides,  uniformity  itself  is  cumulative,  and 
accumulations  of  slight  changes  tend  neces- 
sarily and  invariably  to  catastrophes. 

It  may  take  a  long  period  for  such  accumu- 
lations to  overthrow  the  equilibrium,  but  the 
time  necessarily  comes  when  there  must  be  a 
readjustment.  Then  the  changes  are  so  rapid 
as  to  be  cataclysmal,  and  a  very  brief  space 
may  suffice  to  work  fundamental  and  revolu- 
tionizing effects. 

It  is  such  catastrophes  as  these,  that  are 
perchance  centuries  in  preparing  and  other 
centuries  in  working  out  their  effects — catas- 
trophes which  are  readjustments  made  neces- 
sary by  changed  conditions,  that  are  lost 
sight  of  by  geologists  of  the  Lyell  school. 
The  fact  that  uniform  conditions  exist  and 
have  been  observed  for  long  periods,  af- 
fords no  basis  for  predicting  the  length  of 
their  continuance,  or  fixing  the  date  of  their 
beginning.  Who  would  be  prepared  in  view 
of  the  uniformity  in  the  contraction  and  ex- 
pansion of  water  under  the  wide  range  of 


80  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

degrees  of  heat  marked  by  40°  to  200°  for, 
the  changes  that  take  place  when  32°  is 
reached  on  the  one  side,  and  212°  on  the 
other?  Yet  something  similar  to  this  is  to 
be  looked  for  throughout  the  whole  domain 
of  nature.  Uniformity  necessarily  tends  to 
its  own  overthrow.  When  catastrophes  are 
spoken  of  and  their  agency  invoked  to  ex- 
plain natural  phenomena,  thought  naturally 
reverts  to  such  as  earthquakes,  volcanoes, 
tidal  waves,  and  the  like,  which  come  seem- 
ingly by  no  law  and  most  unexpectedly.  The 
very  fact  that  such  unpredictable  events  can 
interpose  and  work  wide-reaching  effects, 
make  more  or  less  uncertain  the  estimates 
based  on  rigid  uniformity.  But  these  are 
not  the  kind  of  catastrophes  that  have  been 
most  potential  and  widely  revolutionizing  in 
their  effects,  but  rather  such  as  by  their  cul- 
mination have  brought  increasing  cold  and 
glacieration  unto  the  changing  the  climate 
and  life  of  extensive  regions,  and  those 
which  in  turn  destroyed  the  glaciers,  and 
gave  more  favorable  conditions  to  vegetable 
and  animal  life.  In  such  wide  reaching 
changes,  though  the  causes  leading  up  to 
the  event  may  have  acted  slowly  and  uni- 
formly, there  must  be  conceived  to  have 
been   an   acceleration   of   rate   as   the   crisis 


OF  EVOLUTION.  81 

approached,  and  with  it  a  more  intense  and 
rapid  action  of  all  the  forces. 

The  avalanche,  for  example,  is  prepared  for 
by  each  increase  of  snow  and  ice, — and  as 
certainly  as  the  mass  grows,  so  certainly  will 
the  law  of  gravity  cause  a  portion  some  day 
to  be  launched  on  its  destructive  course,  but 
no  one  can  predict  the  time,  or  measure  the 
rapidity  or  extent  of  the  changes,  by  the  rate 
of  growth  that  produced  the  needful  con- 
ditions.6 Whatever  were  the  cause  or  causes 
of  the  glacier  period  we  may  be  sure  the 
nearer  it  came  to  its  culmination,  the 
more  intensely  they  operated.  And  what- 
ever causes  produced  the  increase  of  heat 
which  melted  them,  we  may  be  certain  that 
each  season  brought  a  more  and  more  rapid 
wasting  of  the  accumulated  ice,  and  a  cor- 
responding amelioration  of  climate,  until  an 
equilibrium  was  reached. 

The  position  of  the  earlier  remains  of  human 

6  I  cite  the  Avalanche  as  an  illustration  of  this  sort  of 
cataclysmal  change,  since  however  circumscribed  may  be 
its  effects,  the  catastrophe  is  prepared  for  by  a  gradual 
process,  and  is  followed  by  changes  which  however  rapid 
and  extensive  at  first,  become  finally  slow  and  gradual. 
What  we  would  emphasize  is  that  many  of  the  greatest 
and  most  influential  changes  in  nature  are  of  a  similar 
character— catastrophical— preceded  and  followed  by  long 
periods  of  slow  and  gradual  modifications. 


82  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

art  and  their  juxtaposition  to  the  members  of 
a  fauna  indicative  of  an  almost  arctic  tempera- 
ture, goes  far  to  prove  that  man  had  his  home 
in  Southern  Europe  at  a  period  when  the 
glacier  system  was  with  increasing  rapidity 
passing  away.  The  phenomena  can  only  be 
explained  on  some  such  catastrophical  theory 
as  we  are  advocating.  The  very  length  of 
time  required  on  the  rate  of  change  assumed 
by  the  rigid  Uniformitarian  is  in  itself  a  dis- 
proof of  the  theory.  The  men  of  the  river- 
gravels  and  the  caves  would  seem  to  have 
been  destroyed  or  driven  away  by  just  such 
floods  as  must  have  occurred  in  the  more  and 
more  rapid  melting  of  the  glaciers.  Every- 
thing in  the  situation,  character  and  rela- 
tions, of  the  remains,  suggest  a  sudden — if 
what  may  have  taken  a  century  or  two, 
may  be  called  sudden — change  in  climatic 
conditions. 

The  most  probable  explanation  of  this  change 
supposes  along  with  the  depression  of  the  cen- 
ter and  south  of  Europe,  an  elevation  of  both. 
Northern  Asia  and  Africa — converting  on. 
either  side  of  the  glacier-capped  mountains' 
of  Europe,  what  had  been  land-locked  seas, 
into  denuded  plains.  The  effect  on  the  north 
was  a  lowering  of  the  temperature  of  Northern 
Europe  and  Asia,  and  the  transference  of  the 


OF  EVOLUTION.  83 

belt  of  perpetual  ice  further  north.  While 
on  the  south  the  effect  was  the  drying  of  the 
inland  sea  of  Africa, — the  converting  it  into 
the  heated  waste  of  sand,  known  as  the  Sahara, 
and  this  not  only  took  away  the  most  abun- 
dant source  for  the  precipitation  that  fed  the 
glaciers,  but  furnished  the  heated  winds  that 
caused  them  to  melt  so  rapidly,  that  the  rivers 
must  be  conceived  as  having  fully  a  hundred- 
fold the  volume  and  force  of  to-day.  The  more 
such  a  catastrophe  as  this  is  made  probable 
and  well-nigh  certain,  the  more  likely  does  it 
become  that  its  effects  would  be  most  wide- 
reaching,  and  abandoning  the  Uniformitari- 
an's  disproven  method  of  reckoning,  we  can 
believe  it  need  not  have  been  more  dis- 
tant in  time,  than  that  deluge  of  which 
nearly  every  race  and  language  retains  the 
tradition.  Whether  this  be  so  or  not,  cer- 
tain is  it,  that  time  backward  cannot  be 
computed  on  the  principle  of  rigid  uniformity 
of  the  operation  of  nature's  forces.  And  with 
this  method  of  calculating  time  done  away, 
the  grounds  on  the  score  of  geology  and 
prehistoric  archaeology  for  claiming  for  man 
a  vast  antiquity  also  fail. 

The  extinct  animals  among  whom  he  lived 
give,  we  further  see,  no  criterion  of  age,  be- 
cause they  themselves  are  old  or  not,  just  as  we 


84  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

determine  the  probable  cause  of  their  extinction. 
If,  as  is  most  probable,  they  were  destroyed 
as  much  before  the  changes  of  climate,  and  the 
flooded  condition  of  their  habitat,  as  the  weap- 
ons of  man  or  the  struggle  with  other  beasts, 
the  same  events  that  buried  the  evidences  of 
man's  presence  swept  them  away,  and  contem- 
poraneousness with  them  does  not  add  a  cen- 
tury to  the  age  of  man.  This  is  strongly 
confirmed  by  the  structural  condition  in 
which  many  of  these  remains  are  found. 
Very  many  have  even  to-day  more  of  the 
structure  of  bone,  than  stone.  This  is  es- 
pecially noticeable  in  the  numerous  remains 
of  the  mammoth  in  Russia;  where,  preserved 
by  frost,  specimens  have  been  found  so  per- 
fect as  to  give  an  almost  complete  idea  of  its 
appearance  and  habits.  Indeed,  there  it  is 
plain,  that  a  sudden  destruction  overtook 
whole  herds  of  these  massive  mammals,  and 
that,  at  no  extravagantly  remote  period. 
And  the  fact  that  sudden  glacieration  de- 
stroyed them,  favors,  very  decidedly,  the  hy- 
pothesis, as  to  the  causes  which  destroyed  the 
glaciers  of  central  Europe,  referred  to  above. 

In  considering  the  facts  deduced  from  the 
ancientness  of  race  peculiarities,  and  diversity 
of  language, — the  science  of  Culture, — in  their 
bearing  on  man's  antiquity,  we  have  need  to 


OF  EVOLUTION.  85 

invoke  the  same  principle  we  have  been  con- 
sidering. Quiet  and  slow  as  are  nature's 
forces  when  in  equilibrium,  they  act  violently 
and  rapidly  when  the  equilibrium  is  disturbed, 
— when  they  are  seeking  a  new  adjustment. 
We  are  ignorant  of  the  causes  that  produced 
the  original  divergence  alike  in  races  and 
speech,  but  there  seems  little  doubt  in  the 
light  of  all  analogy  that  whatever  they  were, 
the  limit  of  divergence  was,  within  a  short 
period,  reached.  Since  then  the  environment 
and  the  nature  responsive  thereto,  have  re- 
mained so  constant,  and  the  causes  likely  to 
produce  change  have  been  so  few  and  slight 
during  the  whole  historical  period,  that  the 
principal  types  alike  of  races  and  language 
have  remained  substantially  fixed. 

If  this  be  correct,  then  the  argument  for  a 
long  antiquity  in  order  for  man  to  differentiate 
his  form,  and  color,  and  speech  and  arts  by 
slow  and  gradual  steps,  is  completely  done 
away.  Probably  the  very  same  cataclysm 
that  so  radically  changed  the  climate,  the 
flora  and  the  fauna,  of  man's  dwelling  places, 
may  have  started  the  train  of  causes  that  has 
given  us  the  races  of  men  and  led  to  the  con- 
fusion of  their  tongues.  The  geological  strata 
in  their  breaks,  upheavals,  convolutions,  etc., 
as  well  as  in  their  proofs  of  sudden  transforma- 


86  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

tions  of  life, — extensive  destructions  of  old 
forms  and  the  incoming  of  new  ones — afford 
evidence  that  if  these  changes  were  brought 
about  by  existing  forces,  they  were  operating 
far  more  widely,  energetically  and  rapidly  than 
now.  They  could  not  have  been  wrought  by 
a  law  like  natural  selection  or  survival  of  the 
fittest,  which  only  admits  of  slow  and  almost 
imperceptible  modifications.  Clarence  King 
did  good  service  a  few  years  since  in  showing 
this,  as  to  our  American  continent,  particularly 
with  reference  to  the  more  recent  geological 
ages.  There  is  even  stronger  evidence  of  the 
same  fact  as  to  the  fields  in  Southern  and  West- 
ern Europe  in  which  the  remains  of  prehis- 
toric man  are  found.  He  had  to.  struggle 
with,  and  flee  from,  if  not  succumb  before,  a 
rapidly  and  catastrophically  changing  envir- 
onment. 

The  weakness  of  the  argument  for  a  great 
antiquity,  drawn  from  a  changed  fauna,  and 
the  time  requisite  to  develop  a  high  civiliza- 
tion in  the  same  territory  where  savagery  has 
prevailed  will  be  apparent,  if  we  suppose,  the 
history  of  our  own  country  were  lost,  and  had 
to  be  reconstructed  from  the  material  with 
which  Archa3ologists  have  to  work. 

If  there  were  no  other  data  but  those  mark- 
ing the  contrast  between  the  present  evidences 


OF  EVOLUTION.  87 

of  an  advanced  civilization,  and  the  arrow- 
heads and  flint  implements  dug  up  in  our  fields 
and  gathered  in  our  museums,  the  tokens  of 
a  pre-existent  savagery,  together  with  the  de- 
crease verging  to  extinction  of  a  fauna  natural 
to  a  savage  social  condition,  the  inference 
would  be  drawn  that  an  enormous  length  of 
time  must  have  elapsed  in  order  to  so  great 
and  radical  a  change.  According  to  the  reas- 
oning of  Lubbock,  Tylor,  and  others,  the  num- 
ber of  years  necessary  to  work  such  changes, 
for  the  stone  age  to  develop  into  the  bronze, 
and  the  bronze  into  the  iron,  for  the  old  fauna 
to  yield  to  one  substantially  new,  would  on 
the  hypothesis  of  slow,  gradual  modification, 
be  numbered  by  the  hundred  thousands.  Yet 
in  the  light  of  history  we  know  that  most  of 
these  changes  have  been  wrought  in  a  single 
century,  and  all  have  required  less  than  three 
hundred  years. 

A  careful  weighing  of  the  evidence  leads 
us  to  the  conclusion  that  man's  antiquity  is 
far  less  than  has  been  claimed.  We  deem  it 
certain  that  he  has  not  been  a  denizen  of 
earth  for  the  period  that  must  be  allowed 
on  the  supposition  of  nothing  but  slow  and 
uniform  rates  of  change  in  himself  and  his 
surroundings. 

His  antiquity  we  can  safely  say  is  not  such 


88  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS. 

as  to  support  the  hypothesis  of  mechanical, 
■unintelligent  evolution. 

In  our  next  lecture  we  shall  endeavor  to 
'show  that  equally  there  is  no  good  or  valid 
ground  for  the  assertion  that  man  was  origi- 
nally a  brute-like  savage. 


LECTURE  IV. 

EVOLUTION  AND  CIVILIZATION. 

In  support  of  a  necessary  evolution,  inclu- 
sive of  man  and  everything  below  him,  much 
attention  has  been  given  to  the  proving  that 
his  origin  was  back  in  dim  geological  time, 
and  that  his  original  condition  was  far  below 
that  of  any  known  savages.  Both  these  postu- 
lates are  necessary  to  the  hypothesis  sought 
to  be  proven.  For  while  the  establishment 
of  both  would  not  weaken  the  objections  on 
other  grounds  to  mechanical  evolution,  or 
favor  it,  more  than  the  supposition  that 
an  intelligent  Supreme  Being  has  begun  in 
Creation  and  has  guided  by  Providence, 
whatever  evolution  there  has  been;  we 
readily  see  that  the  failure  to  establish 
either  of  them  is  fatal  to  any  theory  of 
necessary  evolution  as  accounting  for  man's 
origin  and  progress. 

In  our  last  lecture  we  briefly  presented  some 


90  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

of  the  arguments  against  accounting  for  man 
as  an  evolution  from  the  brutes,  and  then  ex- 
amined the  claim  as  to  his  antiquity.  We 
found  that  the  claim  rested  on  an  unproved 
and  improbable  theory  of  uniformitarianism 
in  nature's  operations.  That  the  facts  ad- 
duced proved  indeed  extensive  and  radical 
changes  of  land,  and  water,  and  climate,  of 
vegetation,  animal  life  and  man,  but  that 
such  changes  could  as  well  have  been  ef- 
fected in  one  millennium  as  a  hundred,  and 
did  not  probably  antedate  the  historical  pe- 
riod more  than,  if  as  much  as,  a  thousand 
years.  We  now  turn  our  attention  to  the 
other  postulate,  that  man  at  his  origin  was 
but  a  slight  advance  over  the  brute,  and  that 
he  has  risen  by  slight  and  progressive  modi- 
fications from  an  ape-like  savage  to  his  high- 
est present  condition. 

He  must  be  supposed,  without  intervention 
from  a  Divine  Maker  or  Ruler,  to  have  ac- 
quired his  speech,  his  arts,  his  morals,  his 
religion;  and  to  have  passed  from  the  lowest 
manifestation  of  each  to  the  highest,  by  a 
principle  of  progression  inherent  in  himself, 
or  imposed  by  his  environment. 

Of  course  if  this  could  be  proven,  if  man 
has  come  to  be  what  he  is  by  a  process  as 
slow  and  gradual  as  that  of  natural  selection, 


OF  EVOLUTION.  91 

it  would  be  a  strong  presumption  in  favor  of 
man's  claimed  antiquity.  In  fact  this  is  the 
argument  principally  urged  and  relied  upon 
to  establish  that  fact. 

This  is  the  argument  for  man's  hoary  anti- 
quity deduced  from  the  science  of  culture,  to 
which  in  our  last  lecture  we  scarcely  more 
than  alluded.  We  then  deferred  its  discus- 
sion, because  a  full  reply  to  it  turns  upon 
the  questions  we  are  now  to  consider:  viz., 
Whether  man  ivas  originally  as  brute-like  as  is 
claimed?  And  by  ivhat  process  has  he  become 
what  he  is,  in  his  most  civilized  condition  ?  These 
questions  are  to  be  answered,  not  by  the 
"it  may  be  supposed"  and  "we  may  readily 
conceive  "  style  of  argument  which  is  so  fre- 
quently employed  by  the  advocates  of  an  un- 
intelligent evolution,  but  by  a  careful  weigh- 
ing of  evidence,  an  appeal  to  facts.  If  man 
has  descended  from  the  brutes,  if  he  has  as- 
cended from  an  ape-like  savage,  it  is  to  be 
properly  decided  only  by  an  examination  of 
his  oldest  remains,  the  study  of  his  earliest 
records. 

Now  the  first  question  to  be  asked  is, 
where  are  these  to  be  found?  Assuredly, 
at  the  original  home  of  the  race, — the  cen- 
ter from  whence  he  has  radiated.  For  the 
evolutionist   holds   as   most    accordant   with 


92  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

his  theory,  what  is  otherwise  most  proba- 
ble, the  unity  of  the  human  family,  and  if 
the  diverse  races  have  descended  from  a  com- 
mon ancestry,  there  must  have  been  some- 
where an  original  central  home.  It  is  the 
concurrent  opinion  of  nearly  all  ethnologists 
that  this  home  was  somewhere  on  the  great 
plateaux  of  Central  Asia,  and  that  from  thence 
man  has  migrated  or  extended  unto  the  va- 
rious habitable  portions  of  the  globe. 

Now,  it  will  be  conceded  that  the  evidences 
thus  far  adduced  for  savagery,  and  an  originally 
low  type  of  humanity,  have  not  been  gathered 
in  these  the  earliest  seats  of  man  and  his 
works.  On  the  contrary,  they  have  been  col- 
lated from  what  must  have  been,  supposing 
the  opinions  of  ethnologists  to  be  correct,  the 
very  outposts  of  population,  from  the  scenes 
of  migrations  most  distant  from  the  original 
centres.  The  study  of  the  so-called  "prehis- 
toric man"  has  thus  far  been  chiefly  confined 
to  his  European  habitat.  The  classification 
of  men  according  to  the  materials  used  in 
meeting  their  necessities, — the  division  of 
prehistoric  times  into  Ages  of  Stone,  Bronze 
and  Iron,  is  based  on  what  has  been  learned 
respecting  man,  as  he  has  lived  and  wrought 
in  Western  Europe,  in  Denmark,  Belgium, 
France,  Switzerland,  and  Great  Britain.     Sir 


OF  EVOLUTION.  93 

John  Lubbock  in  his  interesting  and  authori- 
tative work  on  "Prehistoric  Times"  (p.  2) 
says:  "In  order  to  prevent  misapprehension, 
it  may  be  well  to  state  at  once,  that  for  the 
present,  I  only  apply  this  classification  to 
Europe,  though  in  all  probability  it  might  be 
extended  also  to  the  neighboring  regions  of 
Asia  and  Africa."  Should  we  concede  all 
that  is  claimed  respecting  the  successive  pe- 
riods through  which  man  is  supposed  to  have 
lived  in  Europe,  there  is  absolutely  nothing 
presented  to  show  that  his  lowest  and  rudest 
condition  there,  was  not  contemporaneous 
with  not  only  a  higher,  but  an  exceedingly 
high  civilization,  in  the  older  homes  of  the 
race.  In  fact  the  evidence  is  entirely  want- 
ing of  a  stone  age,  not  only  in  the  supposed 
original  seat  of  man,  but  in  the  countries  ear- 
liest settled.  In  the  valleys  of  the  Euphra- 
tes and  the  Nile,  where  archaeology  has  pur- 
sued its  investigations  most  thoroughly,  that 
which  is  earliest  in  time  is  usually  found  the 
fullest  of  evidence  as  to  the  skill  and  ability 
of  artisan  and  builder.  As  far  back  as  we 
are  able  to  go  in  the  antiquities  of  Egypt,  and 
Babylon,  of  Persia,  India  and  China,  we  are 
able  to  discern  no  inferiority  in  man,  his  works 
or  his  civilization.  His  achievements  bespeak 
him  the  peer  of  his  descendants.     If  his  first 


94  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

exercises  of  skill,  his  first  attempts  in  the  arts 
were  with  stone,  he  so  soon  passed  beyond  it 
and  out  of  its  limitations,  that  there  are  no 
such  relics  or  remains  of  stone  weapons  or 
implements,  as  would  suggest  a  time  when 
their  use  was  general.1  What  prehistoric 
archaeologists  are  fond  of  terming  "primitive 
men"  "  the  oldest  known  types  of  humanity," 
are  by  no  means  likely  to  have  been  really 
such,  since  they  are  found  just  where,  and 
only  where  we  would  expect  to  find  the  strays 
and  exiles  from  the  ancient  home,  and  amid 
surroundings  that  made  the  struggle  of  life 
most  severe.  Hence  to  find  rudeness  of  art, 
and  inferior  civilization,  yea,  savagery  here, 
would  tell  nothing  as  to  what  might  have 
been  the  condition  at  the  same  time  in  the 
older  abodes  of  men.  Bearing  in  mind  that 
the  facts  we  are  to  consider  refer  not  necessa- 
rily to  primitive  man,  but  only  to  the  earliest 
inhabitant  of  Western  Europe,  let  us  examine 
into  their  significance  as  showing  his  original 
condition,  and  the  successive  steps  of  his  up- 
ward progress. 

It  is  conceded  by  all  that  the  men  of  the 

1  Implements  and  weapons  of  stone  are  found  in  Egypt 
and  Babylonia,  but  not  under  such  circumstances  as  to  in- 
dicate exclusive  use,  or  a  ".s/one  <Tje-"  Vide  Southall's 
"Epoch  of  the  Mammoth,"  Chap.  XIX. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  95 

Drift,  the  contemporaries  of  the  cave  bear 
and  the  mammoth,  the  claimed  to  be  old- 
est inhabitants  of  Europe,  were  true  men, 
and  removed  many  degrees  from  the  brute. 
As  was  seen  in  our  last  lecture — the  few 
human  crania  and  bones  that  have  been  dis- 
covered, prove  the  men  of  that  age  to  have  been 
far  removed  from  the  ape,  to  have  been  human 
in  form,  and  with  brains  promising  as  much 
native  ability  and  intelligence  as  their  de- 
scendants. There  is  an  utter  failure  to  con- 
nect them  with  the  brute.  The  earliest  men 
in  Europe  possessed,  we  have  good  evidence, 
not  only  speech,  and  reason,  but  the  rudi- 
ments of  the  arts,  and  morality, — character- 
istics which  mark  them  as  of  a  different  order 
from  the  brutes.  The  facts  that  man  has  pro- 
gressed to  where  he  is,  and  that  no  savages 
have  been  found  so  degraded  and  debased, 
as  not  to  be  susceptible  of  improvement,  con- 
clusively show  that  man's  powers  as  man 
differ  in  kind  from  those  ol'  the  brute  tribes, 
otherwise  the  failure  to  find  animals  capable 
of  similar  progress  and  improvement  is  in- 
explicable. 

It  is  a  confirmation  of  this  view  that  the 
savage  races  existing  to-day,  and,  on  the  hy- 
pothesis supposed,  the  survivals  of  an  ancient 
savagery,  afford,  it  is  now  conceded,  no  in- 


"96  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

stances  of  any  race  without  speech,  or  morals, 
or  religion ;  and  equally  none  who  fail  to  ex- 
hibit capabilities  of  progress,  and  such  com- 
munity of  nature  as  stamp  them  as  one  with 
man,  and  separated  by  an  impassable  gulf  from 
the  highest  brutes.  The  natural  powers  of  the 
savage,  even  of  the  lowest,  are  far  greater  than 
they  seem,  to  those  who  estimate  their  achieve- 
ments and  adaptations  in  the  light  of  a  radically 
different  environment  and  civilization.  Every- 
thing connected  with  them  has  suffered  in  be- 
ing reported  to  us  by  those  who  have  had 
absolutely  no  points  of  sympathetic  contact 
with  them.  Their  strange  speech,  and  habits 
of  life,  are  often  altogether  unintelligible  to  a 
casual  observer.  Travellers,  judging  every- 
thing by  their  own  standards,  have  frequently 
reported  them  as  simply  brutish.  But  when 
their  languages  have  been  mastered,  their 
customs  and  views  sympathetically  studied, 
and  their  devices  to  meet  experienced  needs 
investigated,  it  has  always  been  found  that 
they  possess, — in  a  rudimentary  form  indeed, 
but  really, — all  the  human  capabilities  and 
powers  which  have  wrought  out  higher  civ- 
ilizations. The  late  Charles  Darwin,  what- 
ever we  may  think  of  his  theories,  was  a 
careful  observer  and  an  honest  reporter  of 
facts,  and  his  testimony  on  this  point  is  wor- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  97 

thy  of  note.  In  his  "Voyage  of  a  Naturalist" 
lie  expresses  his  belief  that  the  Fuegians  ex- 
ist in  a  lower  state  of  improvement  than  any- 
other  savages.  Comparing  them  with  the 
Australians,  while  assigning  superiority  to  the 
latter  in  acquirements,  because  they  can  boast 
of  the  boomerang,  the  spear,  and  thro  wing- 
stick,  their  method  of  climbing  trees,  of  track- 
ing animals,  and  of  hunting,  "  It  by  no  means 
follows,"  he  says,  "  that  they  are  likewise 
superior  in  mental  capacity."  From  what  he 
saw  of  the  Fuegians  on  the  "  Beagle,"  who 
had  spent  two  years  in  England,  he  says, 
"compared  with  what  I  have  read  of  the 
Australians,  I  should  think  the  Fuegians  the 
more  improvable."  Of  these  Fuegians  on 
the  "Beagle"  he  further  says,  "I  was  con- 
tinually struck  with  surprise  how  closely 
they  resembled  us  in  disposition  and  in  most 
of  our  mental  qualities."2 

And  the  more  it  is  looked  into,  the  more 
will  the  conviction  grow,  that  it  is  the  use 
of  a  false  criterion  of  judgment, — it  is  the 
trying  them  by  the  standard  of  our  modern 
and  artificial  civilization,  that  has  led  to  the 
assignment  of  savages  to  kinship  with  the 
brutes.  The  savage,  despite  the  fewness  of 
his  wants,  the  limited  range  of  his  thoughts, 

2  Darwin's  "Voyage  of  a  Naturalist,"  pp.  207,  434. 


98  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

shows  all  the  attributes  of  humanity — and  in 
mental  capacity,  in  the  essentially  manlike 
quality  of  intelligent  adaptation  to  his  en- 
vironment, is  the  equal  of  his  civilized  broth- 
er. The  degree  of  skill  and  the  extent  to 
which  he  uses  it,  the  actual  inventions  and 
contrivances  which  prove  thought  and  re- 
flection, the  adaptations  that  show  the  pos- 
sibility of  progression,  may  greatly  vary, 
and  be  fewer  among  savage  than  civilized 
men,  yet  so  far  as  he  feels  his  needs  man 
everywhere  and  under  all  circumstances  ex- 
hibits the  capacity  to  meet  them.  And  it 
will  invariably  be  found  that  the  savage  has 
attained  to  and  practiced  the  best  devices 
attainable  in  his  circumstances.  If  the  civil- 
ized man  were  placed  in  exactly  the  same 
environment,  with  all  his  superior  knowledge 
and  skill  acquired  under  civilized  surround- 
ings, he  would  we  believe  much  less  success- 
fully wage  the  struggle  for  existence  than  the 
savage,  and  would  be  driven  in  the  end  to 
adopt  substantially  the  same  devices,  weap- 
ons and  utensils,  with  which  the  despised 
barbarian  has  fought  and  won  the  battle 
with  nature.  The  wigwam  of  the  Indian, 
the  mere  brush  shelter  of  the  Fuegian,  the 
hut  of  the  Hottentot,  is  much  more  service- 
able in  the  migratory  life  they  are  compelled 


OF  EVOLUTION.  99 

to  live,  than  the  more  commodious  and  stable 
and  valuable  dwellings  of  civilization.3 

The  invention  of  the  boomerang,  the  cata- 
maran, the  outrigger  that  converts  the  canoe 
of  the  South  Sea  Islander  into  a  very  life  boat 
that  can  ride  in  the  perpetual  surf  of  his  reef- 
bound  home,  serve  in  themselves  to  show  that 
the  savage  is  not  tied  down  to  his  savagery 
by  any  natural  or  inherent  incapacity.     His 

3  Indeed  civilized  man  adopts  the  same  habitations  when 
similarly  circumstanced.  Ernest  Ingersoll,  in  ' '  Harper's 
Monthly,"  April,  1882,  p.  691,  describing  the  "hoodies" 
occupied  by  the  builders  of  the  Denver  and  Bio  Grande 
R.R.,  says:— "You  will  see  numbers  of  little  huts  about 
three  logs  high,  roofed  flatly  with  poles,  brush,  and  mud, 
and  having  only  a  window-like  hole  to  creep  in  and  out 
through;  or  into  a  side  hill  will  be  pushed  small  caves 
with  a  front  wall  of  stone  and  mud  and  a  bit  of  canvas  for 
a  door;  or  Icelandic  fashion  will  be  imitated  in  a  regular 
dug-out,  i.  e.,  a  house  all  cellar  and  roof,  entered  by  a 
slanting  passage  cut  into  the  ground.  In  these  kennels 
the  laboring  men  find  shelter  and  when  they  have  finished 
the  difficult  work  ....  there  is  no  regret  in  leaving  or 
bother  about  locking  up."  In  Parker's  "Early  Fortifica- 
tions of  Rome,"  in  Plate  I.  of  Supplement,  showing  Primi- 
tive Fortifications  of  Gabii,  can  be  seen  a  village  of  huts 
occupied  up  to  1870  by  peasants,  in  close  proximity  to  a  me- 
diaeval tower,  a  fine  and  very  early  temple,  and  to  walls  of 
massive  and  cyclopeean  structure.  Anything  more  primi- 
tive than  these  thatched  tents,— looking  like  haystacks, — 
it  would  be  difficult  to  find.  They  were  used  because  suf- 
ficient for  the  need,  and  if  they  must  be  abandoned,  the 
loss  would  not  be  felt. 


100  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

condition  is  what  it  is  through  other  causes 
than  this.  The  severity  of  the  struggle  for 
bare  subsistence  is  what  holds  him  down. 
Where  there  is  no  division  of  labor,  where 
the  individual  must  centre  all  trades  in  him- 
self, where  there  is  no  dependence  save  on 
personal  skill,  prowess  or  labor;  habitation, 
utensils  and  weapons  will  be  naturally  rude 
and  simple, — just  what  may  be  needful  and 
no  more  to  accomplish  the  desired  end.  A 
Robinson  Crusoe  with  no  wrecked  vessel  to 
draw  from,  however  well  conversant  with  the 
arts  of  civilization,  would  be  forced  to  com- 
mence life  on  his  island,  and  long  continue 
to  live,  in  wrhat  Archaeologists  would  term  the 
Stone  age,  and  would  do  it  no  better  than,  if 
as  well  as,  the  savage.  This  natural  capacity 
to  supply  by  intelligent  contrivance  his  needs, 
as  characteristic  of  man  wherever  found,  is 
further  manifest  in  the  fact,  that  though  wide- 
ly separated  by  distance  or  time,  he  has  se- 
cured the  same  ends  by  substantially  the  same 
devices  and  methods.  There  is  just  variety 
enough  in  the  application  of  the  principle  to 
prove  the  independence  of  the  conception. 
This  might  be  widely  illustrated  did  time 
allow.  I  can  only  barely  refer  to  the  primi- 
tive methods  of  securing  fire;  the  identity  of 
the  principle  of  the  primitive  lamp,  whether 


OF  EVOLUTION.  101 

among  the  Esquimaux,  the  inhabitants  of  the 
Faroe  islands,  or  the  ancient  Greeks,  Romans, 
Assyrians,  or  Egyptians:  the  sling,  the  bow 
and  arrow,  the  spear  and  battle-ax,  as  weap- 
ons, among  races  and  tribes  most  widely  sun- 
dered in  time  as  well  as  locality ;  the  similarity 
of  primitive  pottery,  in  shape,  manner  of  for- 
mation, and  even  decoration,  whether  from  the 
tombs  of  Egypt  or  Peru,  the  mounds  of  Amer- 
ica or  the  caves  of  the  Palaeolithic  Age  in 
Europe,  or  made  to-day  among  widely  scat- 
tered bands  of  savages,  or  by  the  outcasts  of 
civilization. 

Applying  these  principles  gathered  from  the 
study  of  the  lower  races  of  to-day,  to  the  men 
of  the  Stone  age  in  Europe,  we  find  in  the 
simplicity  and  rudeness  of  their  weapons, 
utensils  and  arts,  evidence  not  of  natural 
inferiority,  but  only  of  the  fact  that  they 
were  waging  a  hard  struggle  for  life,  were 
in  the  midst  of  adverse  circumstances.  And 
in  the  fact  that  they  successfully  waged  the 
battle,  that,  surrounded  by  such  natural  ene- 
mies as  the  cave  bear,  the  cave  lion,  the  mam- 
moth and  the  uroch,  they  yet  asserted  and 
maintained  the  mastery,  we  have  the  best  of 
evidence  that  they  were  true  men — not  half 
brutes.  Their  appliances  were  indeed  rude 
and  simple,'but  they  were  sufficient,  and  there 


102  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

is  unmistakable  evidence  that  even  in  the 
midst  of  such  surroundings  and  of  such  a 
struggle,  the  taste  and  aptitude  for  drawing 
and  carving, — the  rudiments  of  what  have 
come  to  be  known  as  the  Fine  Arts, — were 
developed.  These  men  of  the  caves  and  grav- 
els were  unmistakably  the  kin  of  the  European 
of  to-day.  Men  can  be  classified  as  to  their 
civilization,  we  care  not  to  dispute,  both  con- 
veniently and  profitably  according  to  the  ma- 
terials on  which  they  exercise  their  inven- 
tive genius  and  executive  skill,  and  we  do  not 
object  to  the  particular  classification  which 
has  been  proposed  for  the  earlier  inhabitants 
of  Western  Europe. 

The  Rude  Stone  Age,  or  Paleolithic,  the 
Polished  Stone  Age,  or  Neolithic,  the  Bronze 
Age,  and  the  Iron  Age,  well  represent  the  dis- 
tinctive characteristics  of  the  different  condi- 
tions in  which  the  prehistoric  inhabitant  may 
be  supposed  to  have  lived.  How  far  any  or  all 
of  them  were  contemporaneous,  and  how  far 
and  long  they  were  successive,  is  not  proven, 
and  we  doubt  much  if  it  ever  will  be  proven. 
It  is  assumed  by  prehistoric  archasologists 
with  a  bias  toward  mechanical  evolution, 
that  they  were  not  only  successive,  but  that 
they  most  slowly  and  gradually  passed  one 
into   the  other.     Going  backward  from  the 


OF  EVOLUTION.  103 

Iron  Age,  which  is  set  down  as  having  lasted 
over  two  thousand  years,  each  age  is  claimed 
as  vastly  longer  than  the  other,  and  that  the 
earliest,  or  Palaeolithic,  was  the  longest  of  all. 

Now  both  these  postulates  we  hold  to  be 
mere  assumptions,  based  in  part  on  an  as- 
sumed time-measure  that  is  deceptive,  as 
pointed  out  in  our  last  lecture,  and  in  part 
on  the  assumption  that  the  changes  have 
been  entirely  wrought  by  a  process  of  natural 
selection,  or  one  that  has  operated  as  slowly 
and  gradually. 

We  do  not  consider  the  question  of  success- 
iveness as  at  all  settled,  but  waiving  that  for 
the  present,  for  it  is  after  all  unessential,  the 
real  issue  is  as  to  the  causes  and  manner  of 
the  changes  that  merged  the  Palaeolithic  into 
the  Neolithic,  and  that  into  the  Bronze,  and 
that  into  the  Iron  Age?  Did  they  operate 
slowly  or  rapidly  ?  Now  in  assigning  vast 
time  for  these  changes,  the  cause  is  invaria- 
bly assumed  to  be  the  continuation  of  an  evo- 
lution which  had  its  beginning  in  an  ape-like 
man.  In  dismissing  this  as  a  mere  begging 
the  question,  and  in  the  absence  of  reliable 
data  for  computing  time,  we  can  only  reason 
as  to  the  causes  and  manner  of  these  changes 
by  what  we  know  to  have  taken  place  in  his- 
toric time,  and  what  would  be  likely  and  ne- 


104  TRUTHS    AND    UNTRUTHS 

cessary  on  the  well-established  postulate  that 
man  everywhere  is  as  to  his  capabilities  and 
faculties  the  same.  If  the  Palaeolithic  man 
was  not,  we  have  seen,  a  merely  improved  ape, 
he  was  endowed  with  capacity  and  skill  to 
meet  his  most  urgent  wants.  All  the  remains 
of  his  art  attest  that  he  was  so  endowed.  The 
material  on  which  he  exercised  his  ingenuity, 
and,  we  might  add,  the  rudeness  of  his  work, 
tell  absolutely  nothing  as  to  his  mental  en- 
dowments, his  cranial  development,  his  native 
and  potential  ability.  They  merely  tell  us 
something  of  the  conditions  and  circumstances 
under  which  he  waged  the  struggle  for  ex- 
istence. They  tell  us  that  the  struggle  was 
severe,  and  that  it  was  carried  on  in  practical 
isolation,  an  isolation  due  either  to  sparcity 
of  population,  to  geographical  causes,  or  the 
misfortunes  of  warfare. 

The  effect  of  these  causes  was  precisely 
what  is  seen  among  savage  races  and  tribes 
to-day,  a  necessary  bending  of  every  energy 
to  the  mere  preservation  of  life.  But  as  num- 
bers increased,  as  natural  and  human  enemies 
became  less  formidable,  as  the  severity  of  the 
struggle  relaxed,  as  isolation  became  less  com- 
plete, man  had  more  scope  for  the  exercise 
of  his  powers,  and  naturally  and  gradually 
the  Palaeolithic   man   became  the  Neolithic. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  105 

His  weapons,  his  utensils,  become  more  ela- 
borate; though  still  of  stone  there  is  more 
pains  taken  in  the  shape,  the  finish,  the 
ornamentation,  i.  e.,  there  is  regard  paid  to 
beauty  and  elegance,  in  addition  to  mere 
utility.  Later,  they  are  also  made  from  a 
greater  range  of  materials,  betokening  the 
dawn  of  commerce;  while  the  more  numerous 
specimens  of  carving  and  drawing  prove  the 
further  development  of  the  ossthetic  sense. 

The  bronze  age  manifestly  could  only  come 
in  with  the  breaking  down  of  separative 
barriers.  It  tells  of  the  abatement  of  war- 
fare; of  the  dawn  of  commerce;  of  intercourse 
with  older  settlements,  with  the  ancient  civi- 
lization, whence  weapons  and  implements 
and  ornaments  were  obtained,  or  if  manu- 
factured by  themselves,  as  eventually  they 
were,  equally  of  such  intercourse,  since  only 
thus  could  they  secure  the  copper,  and  par- 
ticularly the  tin,  which  enter  into  their 
composition. 

All  the  evidence  as  well  as  probability  goes 
to  show  that  iron,  in  the  same  way,  came  in 
through  outside  influences,  and  for  many 
purposes  drove  out  the  use  of  bronze,  just 
as  that  had  driven  out  the  use  of  stone. 

Now  these  changes  would  go  on,  we  see, 
almost  of  necessity,  unequally.     Some  tribes 


106  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

more  favorably  located,  as  respects  gaining 
subsistence,  the  forsaking  their  isolation,  and 
the  carrying  on  of  commerce,  would  pass 
rapidly  from  one  age  to  another.  Others 
would  continue  for  generations  with  little 
or  no  change.  This  is  axiomatic,  and  does  it 
nut  render  probable  much  of  contemporane- 
ousness in  the  assumed-to-be  successive  ages? 
These  considerations  render  the  classification 
that  has  been  made  worthless  as  a  basis  for 
the  estimation  of  time,  however  valuable  as 
descriptive  of  condition.  Some  measure  of 
contemporaneousness  of  the  four  periods  or 
conditions  is  necessarily  conceded  by  every 
archaeologist,  and  whether  there  was  much 
or  little  as  respects  the  different  tribes  and 
communities  whose  remains  have  been  stu- 
died, there  is  no  reasonable  doubt  but  that 
all,  even  the  oldest,  were  contemporaneous 
with  higher  civilizations  nearer  man's  orig- 
inal home.  It  seems  reasonably  certain  that 
the  portion  of  Europe  where  are  found  the 
remains  of  the  so-called  primitive  man,  was 
already  the  scene  of  one  of  those  forced  mi- 
grations, by  which  ever  and  anon  tribes  and 
races  are  thrust  out  from  their  homes,  and 
by  being  brought  into  new  regions  and  a 
fresh  environment  forced  to  begin  over  again 
and  at  a  disadvantage  the  struggle  of  life. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  107 

This  supposes  the  possibility  of  degradation 
not  only  of  individuals  but  of  races  and  com- 
munities. But  no  student  of  history  or  of 
civilization  can  for  a  moment  doubt  that 
such  degradation  has  occurred,  yea,  is  con- 
stantly occurring. 

The  comparison  of  the  evidences  of  a  former 
civilization,  with  the  condition  of  the  known 
descendants  of  its  possessors,  as  witness  Per- 
sia, Greece  and  Egypt;  the  absolute  loss  of 
a  remarkable  civilization  such  as  the  ruins 
of  Peru,  Central  America,  and  Mexico  tell  us 
existed,  but  of  which  the  natives  of  those 
countries  scarcely  retain  the  tradition;  with 
numerous  instances  of  the  same  fact  as  to 
lesser  civilizations  and  in  narrower  spheres; 
make  certain  that  there  has  been  degradation 
as  well  as  progress  in  the  career  of  nations 
and  races.  Wherever  savagery  is  found,  it 
still  remains  a  question,  as  Von  Humboldt  puts 
it,  "  Whether  it  is  to  be  looked  upon  as  the 
dawning  of  a  society  about  to  rise,  or  whether 
it  is  not  rather  the  fading  remains  of  one  sink- 
ing amid  storms,  overthrown  and  shattered 
by  overwhelming  catastrophes."  American 
archaeology  since  Humboldt's  day,  by  mak- 
ing known  the  existence  in  the  heart  of  our 
continent  of  a  civilization  superior  to  any 
existing   at  the   date   of  its   discovery,  has 


108  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

served  to  greatly  corroborate  his  opinion 
that  the  savages  of  America,  in  all  their 
gradations,  were  the  deteriorated  remnants 
of  races  once  in  a  higher  social  condition. 
The  advocates  of  a  necessary  upward  evolu- 
tion, a  general  progress  of  the  race,  are  con- 
strained to  admit,  along  with  it,  occasional 
instances  of  deterioration  and  cases  of  degra- 
dation. Degeneration  in  culture  is  accordingly 
conceded  by  Tylor  and  Spencer  as  a  secondary 
cause  of  the  barbarism  and  savagery  in  the 
world.  As  where  the  history  can  be  traced 
it  is  found  to  be  invariably  the  primary  and 
single  cause,  it  would  certainly  seem  that  the 
burden  of  proof  that  it  is  not  the  cause  in 
every  case  rests  upon  those  who  dispute  it. 
But  such  degeneracy  not  only  has  occurred, 
but  is  constantly  occurring.  It  goes  ever 
along  with  and  as  a  consequence  of  advanc- 
ing civilization.  Human  progress  has  its 
waifs  and  wrecks,  as  well  as  its  successful 
ventures.  And  those  who  fail  in  the  con- 
stantly intensifying  competition,  who  do  not 
succeed  in  keeping  pace  with  the  advancing 
requirements  of  the  age,  are  dropped  and  lost 
to  sight.  They  are  crowded  out  and  down, 
and  are  compelled  to  wage  the  struggle  in  a 
less  exacting  sphere  and  on  a  lower  plane. 
In  such  instances  there  is  a  reversion  to  what 


OF   EVOLUTION.  109 

is  simple  and  unexacting  in  labor,  ingenuity 
and  skill.  And  so  right  in  the  midst  of  the 
highest  modern  civilization  may  be  found  that 
which  is  as  rude  and  primitive  as  the  relics 
of  the  Stone  age  and  the  cave  men. 

Dr.  Arthur  Mitchell,  in  his  admirable  book, 
"The  Past  in  the  Present,"  has  gathered  a  most 
interesting  series  of  facts  illustrative  of  this 
principle,  and  of  the  survival  because  of  adap- 
tability to  situation  and  circumstances  of  the 
arts  and  utensils  of  the  so-called  Stone  age 
among  those  who  live  in  the  very  midst  of 
present  civilization,  and  who  want  neither  for 
capacity  nor  culture. 

If  the  settler  on  the  frontier  of  our  own 
country,  driven  thither  by  the  severity  of  the 
struggle  in  the  more  thickly  settled  portions 
of  the  land,  were  judged  as  to  intellectual 
power  and  social  culture,  by  the  rudeness  of 
his  sod-house  or  "  dug  out,"  and  by  many  an 
extemporized  appliance,  he  would  stand  a 
chance  to  be  classified  as  of  the  Palaeolithic 
age.  Certain  is  it  that  all  the  so-called  suc- 
cessive ages — of  stone  and  bronze  and  iron — 
are  co-existing  to-day,  have  been  co-existent 
during  the  historic  period,  and  it  seems  not 
an  unwarranted  inference  that  they  have  been 
co-existent  during  the  prehistoric  period  also. 
And  this  is  strengthened  by  the  fact,  that 


110  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

in  the  fluctuations  of  population  it  is  certain 
that  a  people  in  the  Pakeolithic  condition  may 
follow  on  the  same  site  as  well  as  precede 
those  of  a  more  advanced  culture.  This  prob- 
ability has  been  verified  and  proven  by  the 
excavations  of  Dr.  Schliemann  on  the  sites  of 
Ancient  Troy  and  Mycense. 

The  report  of  the  excavations  at  Troy 
shows  the  remains  of  five  successive  cities, 
the  fourth  from  the  surface  being  identified 
by  Dr.  Schliemann  as  the  Troy  of  the  Ho- 
meric Poems.  "Whether  the  identification  be 
correct  or  not,  the  fact  of  the  succession  of 
cities  and  different  populations  on  the  site  re- 
mains, and  the  relics  show,  from  the  oldest 
period  to  the  latest,  the  associated  use  of  stone 
and  bronze:  implements  and  weapons  of  stone 
predominating  at  one  time  and  of  bronze  at 
others, — the  epoch  most  markedly  of  the  Stone 
age  being  the  third,  or  the  one  exactly  inter- 
mediate between  the  others.  The  very  oldest 
relic-bed  yielded  terra-cotta  whorls  and  fine 
pottery,  with  articles  of  silver,  bronze  and 
ivory.  His  excavations  at  Mycenas  reveal 
the  same  intermixture,  the  seemingly  oldest 
workings  in  gold  and  silver  and  bronze  being 
the  most  perfect  and  beautiful,  and  found  in 
association  with  arrow-heads  of  stone. 

These  facts,  deducible  from  what  has  been 


OF  EVOLUTION.  Ill 

observed  and  ascertained  respecting  the  laws 
and  course  of  culture  and  civilization  in  his- 
toric and  prehistoric  times,  leave  no  ground 
whatever  to  infer  from  the  character  of  the 
weapons,  implements,  dwellings  and  utensils, 
of  the  early  inhabitants  of  Western  Europe, 
either  their  natural  inferiority  to  the  man  of 
to-day,  or  a  very  great  lapse  of  time  in  order 
to  have  undergone  the  changes  in  culture 
denoted  by  the  use  of  stone,  bronze,  or  iron. 

There  is  prevalent  an  erroneous  idea  as  to 
the  nature  and  possibilities  of  human  progress. 
It  has  been  born  of  the  wondrous  achieve- 
ments in  Science  and  the  Arts  which  are  the 
boast  and  pride  of  our  century.  The  indu- 
bitable advance  in  knowledge  and  powrer  over 
nature,  in  many  novel  appliances  and  adjust- 
ments, have  fostered  the  idea  that  we  are 
wiser,  more  skilful,  better  endowed  men  than 
any  that  have  preceded  us.  We  have  solved 
so  many  problems,  conquered  so  many  diffi- 
culties, that  it  seems  as  if  we  were  likely  to 
press  on  to  unlimited  attainments.  All  this 
has  been  favorable  to,  if  not  the  origin  of,  the 
theory  of  a  necessary  upward  progress  of  the 
race.  And  because  of  this,  many  have  been 
won  to  acceptance  of  mechanical  evolution  as 
the  explanation  of  man's  seemingly  unlimited 
upward  progression.     Hence  it  is  the  more 


112  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

important  that  we  come  to  a  discernment  of 
the  true  nature  and  the  limitations  of  human 
progress.  What  is  commonly  called  progress, 
'and  what  we  hail  as  an  advance  along  the 
whole  line,  and  regard  as  a  slow,  gradual  and 
universal  movement  upward,  is  in  reality 
nothing  but  the  complex  effects  of  advances 
in  a  few  particular  directions.  The  causes  of 
modern  progress  have  been  in  nearly  every 
instance  discoveries.  It  has  not  been  by  the 
slow  and  gradual  uplifting  process  that  the 
mechanical  evolutionist  claims  and  many  imag- 
ine, but  by  leaps.  A  new  principle  has  been 
discovered,  a  new  device  contrived,  an  inven- 
tion made,  each  a  sudden  projection  into  the 
current  of  activity,  which  has  deflected  it  into 
new  channels,  or  entirely  turned  its  course. 
The  effect  of  every  discovery  is  at  first  revolu- 
tionary within  the  sphere  where  it  operates. 
The  advance  in  the  new  direction  is  rapid 
until  the  potentialities  of  the  principle  or  sug- 
gestion are  exhausted,  when  progress  ceases, 
the  evolution  stops,  or,  as  sometimes,  is  con- 
verted into  a  retrogression.  For  example:  A 
chief  factor  in  modern  progress  has  been  the 
discovery  and  application  of  the  force  of  steam. 
It  is  scarcely  more  than  a  century  since  it  was 
first  successfully  applied  to  the  generation  of 
power.     Yet  for  twenty-live  years  not  a  sin- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  113 

gle  new  factor  or  element  has  been  discovered 
whereby  to  increase  its  potency  or  extend  its 
applications.  One  generation  nearly  sufficed 
to  carry  the  discovery  to  its  farthest  limits 
and  exhaust  its  potentialities.  We  are  now 
engaged  in  doing  the  same  thing  with  elec- 
tricity, and  less  than  fifty  years  will  probably 
be  enough  to  perfect  the  analysis  and  deter- 
mine all  its  capabilities. 

It  is  the  same  with  that  other  characteris- 
tic of  our  age, — the  saving  of  labor  by  me- 
chanical devices. 

Within  a  very  brief  period  substantial  per- 
fection is  reached.  The  spinning-jenny,  the 
sewing  machine,  the  mower  and  thresher  soon 
reach  the  full  measure  of  adaptability  to  their 
work  and  thenceforward  there  is  no  improve- 
ment. Man's  natural  capacities  are  such  that 
applied  to  the  solution  of  any  problem,  the 
meeting  of  any  necessity,  it  is  soon  accom- 
plished and  that  fully.  The  element  that  is 
new  in  modern  progress,  is  not  any  increase 
or  change  in  that  capacity,  but  only  in  the 
circumstances  under  which  it  has  been  called 
to  act. 

The  greatest  achievements  after  all  are 
not  those  of  which  our  times  can  boast, — 
those  things  most  essential  in  the  struggle 
for    existence    and    comfort,    were    devised, 


114  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

invented  or  discovered  way  back  in  the 
obscurity  of  a  dim  past.  And  their  dis- 
coverers and  inventors  were  by  that  very 
circumstance  shown  to  have  been  men  of 
like  capacity  with  us.  The  most  useful  pro- 
cesses and  arts,  the  most  essential  of  im- 
plements and  devices,  the  fundamentals  of 
mechanics,  as  the  making  of  bread,  the  mould- 
ing of  pottery,  the  mechanical  powers,  were 
not  only  discovered  by  the  progenitors  of  the 
race,  but  were  so  early  carried  to  their  per- 
fection that  nothing  has  since  for  thousands 
of  years  been  added  to  them.  When  the  pos- 
sibilities have  been  tested  and  exhausted,  as 
they  soon  are,  the  world  is  by  so  much  en- 
riched, but  progress  in  these  channels  ceases. 
Much  so-called  progress  is  only  re-discovery. 
Arts  are  lost  through  change  of  taste  and 
method,  and  are  so  speedily  and  utterly  for- 
gotten, that  when  revived  and  practiced  in 
response  to  a  revived  demand  they  are  hailed 
as  new  discoveries.  When  subsequent  re- 
search shows  them  ancient,  it  is  frequently 
and  almost  invariably  found  that  the  older 
and  forgotten  forms  are  the  superior,  attest- 
ing that  the  capabilities  of  the  ancients  were 
no  whit  inferior  to  the  moderns. 

All  the  facts   bearing  on   the  past  of  our 
race,  on  the  development  of  civilization,  favor 


OF  EVOLUTION.  H5 

the  conception  that  man  came  on  the  theatre 
of  earth  in  the  plenitude  of  his  powers, — not 
in  his  lowest  but  in  his  highest  type. 

Placed  in  the  world  to  master  it,  he  soon 
won  the  lordship  over  nature  and  the  brutes; 
beginning  at  first  with  weapons  and  imple- 
ments rudely  fashioned  of  stone,  he  early 
improved  them,  and  rapidly  passed  from  one 
stage  of  progress  to  another.  But  along  with 
advance  in  civilization  and  culture  went  de- 
terioration and  degradation.  And  in  the  strug- 
gles for  power  and  supremacy,  by  the  neces- 
sary law  of  the  survival  of  the  best  endowed 
in  the  old  and  crowded  homes  of  the  race, 
many  were  driven  forth  to  inhospitable  re- 
gions and  compelled  to  begin  over  again  the 
upward  struggle.  Such  we  believe  to  have 
been  the  Palaeolithic  and  Neolithic  men  of 
Europe.  How  long  they  were  in  that  con- 
dition we  can  only  guess,  but  to  account  for 
their  upward  progress,  it  need  not  have  been 
many  generations. 

It  seems  from  the  configuration  of  skull  and 
skeleton,  they  were  the  progenitors  of  what 
history  calls  the  Iberian  and  Celtic  races,  the 
descendants  of  which  yet  occupy  side  by  side 
the  old  habitat.4     Their  later  impulse  in  civ- 

4  The  grounds  for  this  inference  based  on  the  charac- 
teristics of  crania  examined  are  well  summarized  in  an 


116  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

ilization,  when  developed  and  known  as  the 
Bronze  age,  was  almost  demonstrably  the 
result  of  contact,  and  extensive  commerce 
with  that  mysterious  people,  the  Ancient 
Etruscans. 

The  remains  found  in  Western  Europe 
countenance,  we  thus  see,  neither  of  the  in- 
ferences of  mechanical  evolution.  The  facts 
give  no  indication  of  a  brutish  origin  for  man, 
or  a  necessary  ground  for  assigning  him  a 
very  great  antiquity. 

The  evolution  that  has  culminated  in  the 
present  civilization  is  not  one  that  began  at 
the  brute,  and  has  necessarily  operated.  It 
began  with  a  man,  made  in  the  image  of  God, 
and  has  been  divinely  ordained  and  con- 
trolled. It  seemed  likely  to  be  only  down- 
ward when  disobedience  brought  discord  and 
violence.  The  degradation  and  deterioration 
produced  by  sin,  seemed  to  promise  extinction 
rather  than  upward  progression.  Upward 
evolution  began  and  has  prevailed,  alone 
through  the  recovery  of  the  true  knowledge 
and  image  of  God:  and  the  rapid  and  peculiar 
progress  of  modern  times  is  the  fruit  of  that 

article  on  "The  Present  Phase  of  Prehistoric  Archeol- 
ogy," republished  from  the  "British  Quarterly  Review " 
in  "  The  Eclectic  Magazine  "  of  January,  1873,  Vol.  XVII. 
p.  87. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  117 

fuller  revelation  and   redemption   which  we 
have  in  Jesus  Christ. 

This  I  believe  to  be  the  true  philosophy 
of  civilization,  and  the  key  that  explains 
why,  in  the  opposing  tendencies  upward  and 
downward,  the  outcome  has  been  the  im- 
provement rather  than  the  deterioration  of 
the  social  condition  of  the  race.  I  have  not 
time  to  pursue  the  inviting  theme.  For  the 
present  I  must  be  content  with  having  shown 
the  failure  at  every  point  of  Mechanical  Evo- 
lution, be  it  Materialistic  or  Agnostic. 


LECTURE  V. 

EVOLUTION   A.ND  THE  BIBLE. 

We  have  seen  in  the  discussion  of  evolution 
and  its  applications  that  its  truths  and  untruths 
inhere  in  the  form  of  the  theory  which  is  held. 
These  are  reducible  to  simply  two. 

The  one  may  be  properly  designated  as  me- 
chanical evolution,  since  it  acknowledges  no 
other  cause  or  causes  than  what  inhere  in  things 
themselves:  it  operates  necessarily  and  contin- 
uously, and  everything  now  existing,  man  in- 
cluded, has  been  differentiated  from  an  orig- 
inal nebulous  mass  without  intervention  or 
control  of  any  power  above  or  outside  itself. 
In  this  bald  form  it  seems  purely  materialistic 
or  atheistic,  and  fails  so  signally  to  give  any 
satisfactory  account  of  crucial  facts  that  it  is 
with  difficulty  maintained  or  defended,  with 
any  show  of  reason  or  by  any  considerable 
body  of  adherents.  Hence  the  vast  majority 
of  those  who  accept  and  hold  to  this  form  of 
the  theory,   suppose  a  first  cause,  an  initial 


TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS.  119 

creative  act,  a  sort  of  Deity,  to  bring  into  ex- 
istence the  matter  and  force,  whose  interaction 
in  accordance  with  fixed  laws  have  produced 
everything  that  exists.  And  as  these  evolu- 
tionists, while  conceding  that  there  may  have 
been  a  creation  and  a  Creator,  and  by  this 
concession  escape  some  of  the  difficulties  of 
pure  materialism,  yet  claim  that  this  origina- 
tor of  all,  is  and  must  ever  remain  "  the  un- 
knowable," they  are  properly  termed,  agnostics. 

Whether  atheistic  or  agnostic,  such  evolu- 
tion is  blind,  unintelligent  and  necessary, 
knowing  no  causes  except  mechanical  and 
efficient  ones. 

The  other  form  of  the  hypothesis  may  be 
termed  purposive  evolution,  in  that  it  is  a 
process  which  proceeds  in  accordance  with  a 
plan  or  purpose,  has  in  it  the  evidences  of 
design,  and  necessitates  not  only  the  interpo- 
sition of  a  personal  intelligent  First  Cause  at 
the  beginning,  but  also  the  wise  and  powerful 
superintendence  and  control  by  such  a  Being 
of  all  the  after  progress. 

This  divergence  in  the  very  definitions  and 
forms  of  the  hypothesis,  naturally  extended 
through  all  its  proposed  applications.  There 
is  no  occasion  that  I  should  fully  recapitulate 
the  contents  of  the  previous  lectures.  In  them 
I  sought  to  point  out  how  the  materialistic,  me- 


120  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

chanical  theory  failed  to  account  for  the  or- 
igin of  matter  and  force  and  the  laws  that 
regulate  their  interaction;  for  that  wonderful 
co-ordination  by  which  the  world  has  escaped 
ruin  and  is  reaching  forth  to  a  better  rather 
than  a  worse  future;  how  it  equally  failed  to 
account  for  life,  intelligence,  and  many  of  the 
features  that  characterize  their  diversity.  I 
still  further  sought  to  point  out  that  it  failed 
still  more  conspicuously  in  bridging  the  gulf 
that  separates  man  from  the  brutes,  and  that 
its  necessary  postulates  of  a  vast  antiquit}7  for 
man,  and  an  almost  brute-like  savagery  as  the 
starting  point  in  his  civilization,  were  discred- 
ited when  we  carefully  examined  the  evidence 
by  which  they  were  assumed  to  be  established. 
Along  with  this  exhibition  of  the  untruths,  I 
was  careful  to  express  the  conviction  that 
there  is  an  important  truth  in  evolution  as  de- 
scriptive of  the  general  method  by  which  the 
present  condition  of  things  has  been  reached. 
It  seems  well  established  that  we  may  not 
longer  conceive  of  all  things,  and  especially 
species  of  plants  and  animals,  as  having  orig- 
inated at  one  time  and  in  one  creative  act. 

It  seems  most  probable  that  by  laws,  of 
which  natural  selection  is  doubtless  one,  but 
one  of  very  limited  and  subordinate  effic- 
iency, and  by  forces,  whose  working  we  see, 


OF  EVOLUTION.  121 

but  which  as  yet  we  cannot  formulate,  new 
species  of  life  have  sprung  out  of  old  ones, 
and  the  present  has  been  born  of  the  past; 
that  in  short  a  development, — progress  in  ac- 
cordance with  law, — has  been  characteristic  of 
nature,  and  the  general  rule  of  its  activities, 
and  in  this  sense  there  has  been  an  evolution. 
It  seems  highly  probable  that  just  as  the  tree 
is  developed  out  of  the  seed,  and  the  animal 
from  the  egg^  so  the  classes  and  families,  the 
genera  and  species  in  which  living  beings 
are  grouped,  have  been  evolved, — developed, 
— have  grown  out  of  simpler  and  less  com- 
plex forms.  It  is  we  hold  a  worthy  study 
to  seek  the  efficient  causes,  the  general 
laws  of  this  evolutionary  progress,  and  we 
are  grateful  to  the  science  which  is  so  in- 
dustriously seeking  out  and  illustrating  the 
hidden  bonds  that  connect  diverse  phenomena 
and  forms.  But  we  have  sought  to  show  by 
pointing  oat  some  of  its  failures  and  fallacies, 
that  a  purely  mechanical  process,  which  rec- 
ognizes only  material  and  efficient  causes,  is 
not  a  sufficient  explanation  of  the  evolution. 
There  is  throughout  the  whole  process  the 
evidence  of  a  working  toward  an  end,  of  the 
unfolding  of  a  plan,  of  an  adjustment  or  co- 
ordination of  laws  and  forces,  which  bespeaks 
design  and  a  designer  controlling  the  inter- 


122  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

action  of  the  mechanical  and  efficient  causes. 
Single  laws  act  uniformly  and  invariably; 
brought  into  juxtaposition,  knowing  the  ac- 
tion of  each  on  the  other,  having  before 
us  all  the  forces  and  conditions,  we  can  pre- 
dict with  certainty  the  result, — the  necessary 
outcome.  The  achievements  of  our  modern 
arts  and  civilization,  have  been  brought 
about  by  just  such  intelligent  co-ordination  or 
combination  of  fixed  and  unchangeable  laws. 
When  useful  and  beneficent  results  thus  issue 
from  the  interaction  of  selected  forces  or  laws, 
when  the  finished  pattern  comes  from  the  Jac- 
quard  loom,  or  time  and  distance  are  almost 
annihilated  by  steam  and  electricity,  we  are 
constrained  to  recognize  the  intervention  of 
a  co-ordinating  intelligence  and  will.  Such 
results  are  not  explicable  by  a  consideration 
of  the  efficient  causes  merely,  for  they  depend 
on  the  purposive  collocation  and  regulation  of 
the  causes  rather  than  the  mechanical  energy 
which  makes  them  efficient.  Finding  there- 
fore in  nature  results  indicative  of  a  purpose, 
and  in  the  general  course  of  nature  a  pro- 
gression,— an  evolution — we  in  like  manner 
are  forced  to  the  assumption  of  a  controlling 
Intelligence  and  Will,  to  at  all  adequately  ex- 
plain the  particular  collocation  and  co-ordina- 
tion by  which  such  results  have  come  to  pass. 


OF  EVOLUTION.  123 

The  universe  had  an  Intelligent  Creator,  or  it 
was  born  of  a  lucky  chance. 

It  has  throughout  been  my  endeavor,  in 
developing  what  of  truth  there  is  in  evolu- 
tion, to  emphasize  the  necessity  of  a  Provi- 
dence continuously  directing  and  controlling, 
as  much  as  of  a  Creator  planning  and  pro- 
ducing, the  universe.  It  is  a  conception,  not 
particularly  repugnant  to  the  mechanical  evo- 
lutionist, that  the  world  is  only  an  infinitely 
perfect — a  self-propagating,  and  self-regulat- 
ing— mechanism,  even  though  an  act  of  crea- 
tion be  assumed  for  its  origination. 

It  was  shown  that  such  a  theory,  though 
it  be  in  a  sense  Theistic — conceding  as  it  does 
the  existence  of  a  God,  and  the  infinity  of  His 
knowledge  and  power, — affords  only  a  par- 
tial and  inadequate  explanation  of  the  facts. 

I  have  therefore  pointed  out  that,  granting 
much  for  the  operation  of  unknown  and  un- 
formulated causes  in  producing  modifications 
and  new  adjustments,  the  interposition  of  a 
power  outside  of  nature  is  as  necessary  to 
explain  many  things  in  the  course  of  this 
evolution  subsequent  to  its  beginning;  — 
e.  (/.,  the  advent  of  life,  sensation,  intelli- 
gence, and  man — as  to  account  for  the  first 
creative  act. 

The  inference  of  repeated  interpositions  of 


124  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

creative  power  is  as  unavoidable,  as  of  the 
first;  while  concession  of  one  takes  away 
every  a  priori  objection  to  others.  If  God 
has  interposed  once  and  again  as  Creator,  it 
renders  most  probable,  if  not  certain,  such  a 
supervision  of  His  work  as  is  expressed  in  the 
idea  of  providence. 

We  saw  that  the  evolution  which  earth  has 
experienced  went  forward,  not  merely  by  slow 
and  gradual  modifications,  but  also  by  leaps, 
by  great  and  sudden  transformations,  indica- 
tions, if  not  of  the  introduction  of  new  forces, 
at  least  of  a  new  collocation  and  adjustment 
of  existing  ones;  and,  by  consequence,  a  strong 
suggestion  of  some  superior  power  co-ordina- 
ting, governing,  and  controlling  them. 

All  this  was  only  confirmed  and  established 
by  the  study  of  man. 

We  saw  that  mechanical  evolution  utterly 
failed  in  its  endeavor  to  connect  him  with  the 
brutes.  However  much  his  body  suggests 
kinship  with  lower  creatures,  the  points  of 
divergence  are  so  great  and  radical,  above 
all  his  mental  and  spiritual  attributes  are  so 
different  not  only  in  degree  but  in  kind,  that 
it  is  impossible  to  view  him  as  other  than  the 
creation  of  God. 

We  further  saw,  from  his  civilization,  that 
always  and  everywhere,  whatever  his  environ- 


OF  EVOLUTION.  125 

ment,  man  is  a  controller  and  co-ordinator  of 
the  forces  and  objects  around  him  for  the  ac- 
complishment of  his  purposes, — is  a  self-de- 
termining Providence  to  himself  and  those 
dependent  on  him;  and  this  serves  to  prove 
him  akin  in  his  nature  to  that  Being  who  is 
supreme  over  all.  Through  his  spiritual  na- 
ture, his  capacity  for  abstract  thought,  his 
self-determining  will,  his  moral  sense,  he  is  able 
to  attain  to  a  knowledge  of  God.  Through 
these  attributes  of  Spirit,  he,  though  a  finite 
being,  is  able  to  catch  a  true,  though  it  may 
be  a  partial,  glimpse  of  the  Infinite  Spirit. 

Evolution  viewed  thus  as  a  divinely  planned 
and  ordered  process,  becomes  we  believe  even 
a  better  and  surer  basis  of  Natural  Religion, 
than  the  conception  of  special  multitudinous 
creations.  Rightly  viewed  it  carries  with  it 
the  conviction  that  God  in  power,  wisdom  and 
goodness   has  made  and  governs  the  world. 

The  older  theory  chiefly  emphasizes  his 
power.  This  throws  into  prominence  more 
particularly  his  wisdom  and  goodness.  The 
failure  of  mechanical  evolution,  and  the  es- 
tablishment of  a  purposive,  teleological  evo- 
lution, thus  strengthens  instead  of  overthrows 
all  the  inferences  as  to  God,  His  nature  and 
His  works,  which  Natural  Religion  has  drawn. 
It  only  remains  for  us  to  show  the  relation  of 


126  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

such  evolution  to  the  Bible  and  the  Bible  to 
it.  Many  readily  concede  the  consistency  of 
evolution  and  natural  religion.  But  not  a 
few  who  admit  and  rest  upon  this,  claim  that 
it  has  discredited  the  Bible,  as  the  Word  of 
God,  and  made  necessary  the  abandonment 
of  the  idea  that  we  possess  an  authoritative 
Revelation  from  the  infinite  Creator  and  Ruler. 
At  the  same  time  it  is  not  to  be  disguised, 
that  many  have  hesitated  to  accept  any  sort 
of  evolution,  and  have  been  troubled  at  the 
very  suggestion  of  its  possible  truthfulness, 
lest  its  establishment  might  involve  the  over- 
throw of  revealed  religion.  We  believe  the 
boast  of  the  one,  as  the  fear  of  the  other,  is 
without  foundation.  Evolution  helps  us  to 
understand  and  interpret  the  Bible;  and  the 
Bible  equally  helps  us  to  better  understand 
and  explain  evolution.  They  rest  upon  dif- 
ferent lines  and  kinds  of  evidence,  and  the 
claimed  antagonism  is  very  largely  the  result 
of  exclusive  attention  to  the  particular  criteria 
by  which  their  truthfulness  is  respectively 
established.  The  truthfulness  of  the  Bible,  its 
claim  to  be  the  Word  of  God,  rests  upon  as 
good  evidence  of  its  kind,  as  that  whereon 
scientific  truth  reposes;  and  it  is  a  kind  which 
as  appealing  to  the  individual  consciousness 
and  experience  as  well  as  the  reason,   is  to 


OF  EVOLUTION.  127 

many  minds  more  convincing  than  that  to 
which  evolution,  or  any  scientific  inference, 
must  appeal. 

It  is  not  necessary  that  I  should  enter  upon 
the  broad  theme  of  the  rightful  and  different 
criteria  of  truth,  and  show  on  what  convincing 
evidence  rests  the  conclusion  that  our  holy 
religion  is  true,  and  that  the  book  which  tells 
of  its  origin  and  history,  and  which  is  the  only 
sufficient  explanation  of  the  fact  of  its  exist- 
ence, is  God's  book  and  truth  itself.  I  only 
claim  that,  supposing  it  to  be  such,  it  is  authori- 
tative upon  the  points  on  which  it  speaks.  Did 
we  as  infallibly  understand,  as  God  has  here 
infallibly  revealed  His  truth,  it  would  be  con- 
clusive in  matters  of  science  so  far  as  touched 
upon,  as  well  as  in  religion.  But  in  the  inter- 
pretation of  the  Bible,  as  well  as  of  nature, 
there  is  need  of  caution  and  moderation  of 
statement.  It  may  well  be  doubted  if  our 
exegesis  of  Scripture  is  as  yet  in  all  points  sat- 
isfactorily decided.  Doubts  and  obscurities 
have  been  removed  by  a  more  exact  criticism 
of  the  text,  by  a  more  thorough  application 
of  grammatical  rules,  by  the  discoveries  of 
history  and  archasological  research,  and  this 
good  work  will  continue,  to  our  better  under- 
standing of  the  Word  of  God.  And  among 
the    rightful   appliances    for   shedding   light 


128  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

on  the  Bible  we  believe  the  ascertained  facts 
and  truths  of  Natural  Science  are  as  deserv- 
ing of  regard,  as  those  of  grammar,  history, 
or  archaeology. 

There  are  those  who  because  the  science  of 
geology  or  of  biology,  the  probable  hypothe- 
sis of  evolution,  contradict  their  exegesis  of 
some  passages  of  Scripture,  are  ready  to  as- 
sert they  are  antagonistic  to  revelation.  And 
equally  others  who  because  their  traditional 
views  of  Bible  teaching  have  been  contra- 
dicted by  scientific  discoveries  which  they  are 
constrained  to  accept,  are  ready  to  declare 
the  authority  of  the  Bible  overthrown.  Far 
wiser  and  more  likely  to  be  fruitful  of  advan- 
tage to  the  truth  will  it  be  to  let  each  inter- 
pret  the  other,  and  seek  rather  for  the  points 
of  agreement  than  those  of  difference.  Be- 
lieving as  I  do  the  Bible  to  be  the  Word 
of  God,  and  nature  the  work  of  God,  I  am 
confident  that  time  will  prove  their  entire 
agreement,  and  if  meanwhile  there  seem 
points  of  antagonism,  I  can  wait  in  faith  the 
clearer  light  which  will  show  their  real  agree- 
ment, and  meanwhile  examine  the  more  care- 
fully alike  the  accepted  interpretations  of  Scrip- 
ture and  the  postulates  of  science  to  the  end 
of  discovering  wherein  the  error  that  certainly 
exists  and  makes  the  antagonism,  may  lie.    It 


OF  EVOLUTION.  129 

surely  ought  not  to  surprise  us  or  trouble  us, 
if  we  may  not  at  once  bring  every  detail  into 
accord,  especially  when  our  knowledge  is  yet 
so  imperfect  and  so  much  of  our  science,  if 
not  of  our  exegesis,  is  hypothetical.  It  will 
speak  much  for  the  probable  truthfulness  of 
evolution  as  a  divinely  ordered  process,  if  it 
is  not  only  not  absolutely  contradicted  by 
the  Bible,  but  is  found  in  general  features  to 
be  in  accord  with  its  revelation  of  God  and 
His  working.  This,  I  believe,  is  the  state  of 
the  case.  As  has  already  been  seen,  evolu 
tion  leaves  unaffected  the  old  argument  from 
the  evidences  of  design,  for  the  existence  of 
God.  It  proves  that  God  exists,  that  He  has 
an  interest  in  all  His  works,  and  especially  in 
man,  and  thus  makes  probable  that  to  beings 
endowed  with  capacity  to  know  Him,  and 
enter  into  spiritual  communion  with  Him,  He 
would  more  fully  reveal  Himself  and  His  pur- 
poses of  grace. 

Assuming  that  what  is  thus  probable  has 
actually  occurred,  that  in  the  Bible  we  have 
this  fuller  revelation  of  the  divine  nature  and 
works,  how  does  it  correspond  with  what  we 
have  gathered  about  Him  from  His  other  book, 
that  of  nature  ? 

Evolution,  if  embodying  a  truth,  will  fit  into 
what  we  learn  of  God  from  the  volume  of 

\ 


130  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

revelation,  and  at  no  point  will  there  be  irre- 
concilable antagonisms. 

We  will  briefly  examine  the  two  points  on 
which  the  Bible  seems  to  many  in  conflict 
with  every  form  of  evolution,  and  because  of 
which  some  have  renounced  the  Bible  and 
some  have  opposed  every  form  of  evolution : 
viz.,  its  account  of  creation,  and  the  compara- 
tively brief  time,  according  to  its  chronology, 
that  has  elapsed  since  the  advent  of  man.  As 
to  the  first  I  need  not  greatly  enlarge.  Evo- 
lution has  not  materially  changed  the  condi- 
tion of  the  case  as  settled  in  the  light  of 
geological  facts.  Before  evolution  became 
probable  as  a  method  of  Creation,  geology  had 
made  it  well-nigh  certain  that  earth  and  its 
living  inhabitants  had  not  been  brought  into 
being  less  than  ten  thousand  years  ago,  and 
in  the  course  of  six  days  of  twenty-four  hours. 
Its  revelations  as  to  successive  strata  and 
their  distinctive  fossils  made  necessary  a  vast 
extension  of  the  age  of  the  earth,  and  pro- 
duced the  conviction  that  the  days  of  Genesis 
were  time-cycles  commensurate  with  the  vast- 
ness  and  magnitude  of  the  works  wrought  in 
them,  rather  than  ordinary  days.  A  re-exam- 
ination of  the  Biblical  account  in  the  light 
of  these  facts,  has  led  to  a  general  acceptance 
of  the  view,   as  old  at  least  as  Augustine, 


OF  EVOLUTION.  131 

that  the  days  of  Genesis  are  not  and  were 
never  really  intended  to  be  ordinary  days, 
but  God- divided  or  measured,  rather  than  sun- 
divided,  periods  of  time.  Such  scientists  as 
Hugh  Miller,  Guyot,  Dana  and  Dawson  have 
pointed  out  how  on  the  hypothesis  of  the  days 
of  Genesis  being  long  periods  characterized 
by  distinctive  creative  acts,  there  is  a  most 
remarkable  analogy  between  the  Biblical  and 
geological  records. 

One  of  my  predecessors  in  this  lectureship, 
a  recognized  authority  as  a  Biblical  scholar, 
the  late  Dr.  Tayler  Lewis,  not  only  in  his 
lectures  on  this  foundation,  but  in  his  ad- 
mirable additions  to  Lange's  Commentary 
on  Genesis,  has  well-nigh  put  an  end  to 
controversy  on  this  very  point  by  showing 
that  in  the  history  of  events  so  far  removed 
from  human  experience  as  those  recounted 
in  the  first  chapter  of  Genesis,  we  must,  just 
as  in  prophecy,  look  to  have  words  used 
in  their  primitive  and  profounder  senses, 
since  in  their  ordinary  significance  they  are 
altogether  inadequate  for  the  purpose  in 
hand.  Hence  in  Genesis,  "  day  "  is  a  period 
through  which  a  thought  of  God  and  a  cre- 
ative fiat  is  worked  out;  "evening"  and 
"morning"  are  not  indications  of  time,  but 
characteristics  of  the  process.     The  first,  de- 


132  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

scribing  the  mixed  and  chaotic  condition 
in  which  the  new  order  begins — an  3"$,  only 
the  secondary  sense  of  which  is  evening, 
and  the  other  describing  the  sureness  and 
steadiness  with  which  the  process  went  on, — 
even  as  the  breaking  forth  of  the  dawn  out 
of  the  darkness  of  the  night,  which  is  the 
root  meaning  of  ipa,  the  secondary  sense  of 
which  is  morning. 

His  exhaustive  discussion  of  the  matter 
daves  nothing  to  be  added,  and  has  prac- 
tically settled  the  exegetical  controversy  as 
to  the  time  involved  in  creation,  and  proven 
that  the  narrative  allows  of  all  the  time  that 
the  very  slowest  of  processes  may  require.  As 
bearing  on  evolution,  applying  the  same  prin- 
ciple to  other  expressions,  as  to  the  supposed 
indications  of  time,  Dr.  Lewis  makes  it  plain 
that  the  writer  of  the  history  of  creation  used 
throughout  the  narrative  expressions  suscep- 
tible of  meanings  in  exact  accordance  with 
what  seems  now  the  most  likely  conclusions 
of  science.  The  terms  used  seem  to  suggest 
and  necessitate  the  conception  of  an  evolution. 
The  very  name  of  the  book — nnpifi,  literally 
"births" — suggests  it.  The  terms  of  the  fiats — - 
"let  the  waters  be  gathered  together,"  "let 
the  dry  land  appear,"  "  let  the  earth  bring 
forth  (grow)  grass,"  etc.,  "let  the  waters  bring 


OF  EVOLUTION.  133 

forth  abundantly,"  "let  the  earth  bring  forth 
the  living-  creature  after  Ms  kind," — all  imply 
not  a  simultaneous,  rapid  and  hurried  process, 
but  one  of  development,  succession,  progress, 
— as  plain  intimations  of  evolution  as  we 
could  expect. 

In  the  light  of  the  best  exegesis  and  the 
best  science  there  is  no  real  contradiction  by 
Genesis  of  this  most  probable  scientific  theory 
as  to  the  method  of  creation. 

As  to  the  other  contradiction  claimed, 
which  respects  the  age  of  man  on  the  earth, 
we  saw  in  our  Third  and  Fourth  Lectures 
that  the  space  of  a  few  thousand  years,  or 
even  a  single  thousand  previous  to  the  his- 
torical period,  is  all  that  the  facts  as  to 
the  claimed-to-be-proven  great  antiquity  of 
man  really  demand.  If  the  uniformitarian 
principle  in  geology  be  abandoned,  and  I 
believe  it  must  be,  and  modification  by  noth- 
ing but  short  and  slow  steps  be  disproven,  as 
it  has  been,  man  need  not  be  older  than  the 
shortest  time  that  Biblical  chronology  allows. 
But  while  this  is  so,  it  may  be  well  to  em- 
phasize the  fact  that  the  chronology  of  the 
Bible  is  a  matter  of  deduction  from  incidental 
expressions.  There  is  in  that  divine  history 
no  attempt  to  give  clews  as  to  time,  and  many 
dates  in  the  chronologies  suggested  are  ob- 


134  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

scure  and  uncertain.  The  extent  of  the  un- 
certainty may  be  gathered  from  the  fact  that 
the  various  systems  of  chronology  that  have 
been  proposed,  differ  nearly  fifteen  hundred 
years.  The  Bible  history  gives  time  enough 
for  every  change  that  man  has  witnessed 
or  experienced:  for  the  rise  and  develop- 
ment of  the  ancient  civilizations,  and  the 
diversifications  of  races  and  languages,  on 
the  only  hypotheses  which  at  all  adequately 
explain  the  facts. 

The  Bible  contains  nothing  that  is  not  con- 
sistent with  all  the  requirements  Of  such  evo- 
lution as  we  find  in  nature.  Beyond  this  it 
contains  much  that  serves  to  enforce  and  il- 
lustrate the  conception  that  evolution  rightly 
conceived  is  God's  method  of  working  out 
His  purposes;  that  when  He  creates  it  is  by 
touching  the  sources  of  being  at  points  be- 
yond the  ken  of  science  and  human  observa- 
tion; that  when  He  governs,  it  is  by  so 
collocating  forces  and  laws  that  the  result 
comes  to  pass  through  means  so  slight  and 
insensible  as  to  almost  escape  discovery  and 
analysis. 

The  Bible  itself  as  a  Revelation  is  an 
excellent  example  of  God's  method,  as  evo- 
lutionary. 

The  Divine  Teacher  in  the  first  and  most 


OF  EVOLUTION.  135 

profound  of  His  parables  expressly  says, 
"The  seed  is  the  Word  of  God,"  and  thus 
presents  the  word  as  not  only  having  ca- 
pacity for  growth,  when  received  in  the 
heart,  but  itself  the  result  of  a  growth,  the 
fruition  of  an  evolution. 

The  Bible  has  one  living  central  theme — 
Christ  the  gift  of  God  unto  salvation.     All  its 
parts  are  grouped  harmoniously  about  this  cen- 
tral living  germ.    To  explain  its  unity,  despite 
the  fact  that  it  was  given  in  bits  and  por- 
tions through  more  than  twenty  centuries,  to 
account  for  the  growth  in  fullness  and  clear- 
ness of  the  Revelation,  until  it  culminates  in 
the  Incarnation,  the  Crucifixion  and  the  Res- 
urrection of  the  Saviour,  and  the  outpouring  of 
the  Spirit,  we  are  constrained  to  see  the  con- 
trolling hand  of  God  guiding  and  co-ordinating 
human  agents  and  events  unto  the  unfolding 
more  and  more  of  His  Divine  will  and  pur- 
pose.     The    history   of    God's    kingdom    or 
church   which    the    Bible    contains,    equally 
bears  evidence  that  God  is  bringing  to  pass 
the  glorious  consummation  promised  through 
a    divinely   governed    growth,    or   evolution. 
We    catch   glimpses   of   the    same    thing    in 
the    wider   history    of  the    world,    only    less 
manifestly  since  the  history  is  less  fully  writ- 
ten out  in  the  light  of  its  great  Ruler's  pur- 


136  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

poses.  Yet  everywhere  in  human  events  is 
to  be  discerned  the  working  of  "  a  power  that 
makes  for  righteousness,"  and  Revelation  bids 
jus  see  the  solution  of  the  fact,  in  a  righteous 
God's  controlling  the  springs  of  action,  mak- 
ing the  wrath  of  man  to  praise  Him  and 
restraining  the  remainder  of  wrath. 

His  purposes  are  wrought  out,  while  the 
absolute  independence  of  action,  the  fullest 
freedom  of  will  and  choice,  on  the  part  of 
the  agents,  is  never  once,  so  far  as  conscious- 
ness goes,  interfered  with.  God's  method 
manifestly  is  to  work  His  purposes,  as  far 
as  possible  and  ordinarily,  through  secon- 
dary causes,  by  means  of  natural  laws  and 
forces. 

This  is  not  only  perceptible  in  his  provi- 
dential government,  but  in  many  of  the  signs 
and  wonders  that  attest  His  interposition  on 
behalf  of  that  Redemptive  work,  which  is  the 
theme  of  the  Bible.  Many  of  these  were 
only  new  collocations  of  ordinary  laws,  mir- 
acles merely  because  out  of  the  usual  experi- 
ence of  men;  and  where  there  is  a  direct 
exercise  of  creative  might,  the  introduction 
of  new  forces,  or  unknown  agencies,  such  as 
when  Christ  changed  the  water  into  wine, 
and  fed  the  five  thousand,  the  mode  is  still 
to  use  the  ordinary  and  natural  as  far  as  it 


OF  EVOLUTION.  137 

will  go,  supplementing,  rather  than  supersed- 
ing, the  usual  laws  of  nature. 

The  creative  touch  is  ever  applied  at  the 
sources  of  being,  and  back  of  the  visible  phe- 
nomena. 

The  Bible,  in  its  account  of  God's  workings, 
enforces  the  conception  which  evolution  gives 
us,  that  His  ends  are  accomplished  through 
creative  power  calling  into  being  germs 
which  unfold  through  the  ages  under  the 
control  of  a  watchful  Providence.  Because 
of  this  God  never  makes  haste.  Time  is  one 
of  His  servants,  and  He  lets  time  do  much 
that  we,  in  our  short-sightedness,  would  say 
might  as  well  be  done  by  a  single  momentary 
exercise  of  might. 

Hence  the  Bible's  time — measures,  as  ap- 
plied to  God's  working,  are  expressed  not 
in  years,  or  centuries  even,  but  in  "  Olams," 
(DTSiy),  and  "Eons"  (atcov),  epochs  during 
which  a  thought  of  God  is  wrought  out, 
periods  measured  less  by  the  lapse  of  time, 
than  by  the  succession  of  events.  I  cannot 
pause  to  develop  or  illustrate  this  marked 
characteristic  of  the  Book  of  God,  and  I 
scarcely  need  point  out  how  such  time 
measures  fit  into  the  conception  that  the 
Divine  method  of  compassing  His  results, 
is  by  evolution. 


138  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS 

Still  further,  it  is  a  marked  characteristic 
of  the  Scripture  history  that  most  of  God's 
purposes  are  wrought  out  by  ordinary  Provi- 
dential control,  by  collocation  of  natural  laws 
and  usual  agencies,  and  only  at  crucial  points 
in  the  history  has  He  interposed  by  super- 
natural manifestations,  by  inspired  men  and 
measures,  by  signs  and  wonders  that  are 
miracles.  This  is  precisely  analogous  to 
what  a  right  theory  of  evolution  makes  us 
to  see  in  nature.  There,  as  in  revelation,  God 
ordinarily  and  for  long  periods  wrought  ex- 
clusively through  second  causes,  by  natural 
forces  in  their  ordinary  collocations,  and 
degrees  of  strength,  but  the  history  of  earth 
shows,  just  as  the  Bible  history  points  out, 
that  there  have  been  times  when  a  Creative 
touch  gave  a  new  impulse  and  direction  to 
its  development;  when  life  and  intelligence, 
and  the  soul  of  man  were  introduced,  and  new 
epochs  begun. 

Evolution  while  essentially  a  progression, 
as  applied  to  man,  is  confronted  with  the  fact 
of  deterioration,  degradation.  It  is  the  Bible 
alone  that  unlocks  this  anomaly.  In  its  light 
all  is  plain.  The  cause  of  the  persistent  ten- 
dency downward  is  a  moral  one.  It  is  due 
to  the  presence  of  sin.  Because  of  this,  self- 
ishness and  violence  have  prevailed — when 


OF  EVOLUTION.  139 

might  makes  right,  the  weaker  is  oppressed 
or  driven  forth,  or  debased. 

Evolution  also  tells  us  of  an  upward  trend, 
but  fails  to  show  its  cause  or  limits.  The 
Bible  here  also  supplements  the  light  of  na- 
ture. It  shows  us  that  this  also  depends  on 
right  moral  principles. 

It  shows  us  that  real  human  progress  is 
alone  in  connection  with  God's  Kingdom  of 
righteousness.  Even  the  Mechanical  Evolu- 
tionist has  to  concede  that  all  things  are 
manifestly  working  unto  an  end,  and  that 
this  end  is  man.  The  Bible  shows  the  same 
fact,  but  clears  it  of  its  difficulties  and  limita- 
tions, by  showing  that  it  is  not  man,  a  mortal 
automaton,  that  is  the  end  whereunto  all 
things  conspire,  but  man  the  child  of  God, 
the  heir  of  immortality,  the  possessor  of  a  spirit 
that  is  capable  of  oneness  with  God.  It  pre- 
sents as  the  worthy  end  to  which  a  Divinely 
ordered  Evolution  has  been  and  is  tending, 
the  one  model,  perfect  representative  man, 
the  man  Christ  Jesus,  through  whom  oneness 
with  God  is  attainable,  by  all  who  come  into 
fellowship  with  Him.  Thus  in  many  ways 
do  the  books  of  Nature  and  Revelation  sup- 
plement one  another,  and  a  rightly  conceived 
evolution  and  the  Bible  agree,  rather  than 
conflict. 


140  TRUTHS   AND    UNTRUTHS. 

There  are  mysteries,  and  there  will  be  mys- 
teries, so  long  as  we  see  through  a  glass 
darkly,  and  know  only  in  part,  alike  in  nature 
and  in  Revelation. 

We  may  never  here  perchance  pass  alto- 
gether out  of  the  shadows  which  surround 
us,  but  sure  are  we  that  most  of  truth  will  be 
gained  when  we  look  for  it  in  the  light  shed 
by  the  converging  rays  that  go  forth  from 
Nature  and  Revelation,  when  rightly  studied 
as  having  for  their  source  and  end,  the  glory 
of  God,  as  manifested  in  Jesus  Christ  the 
Saviour  of  all  who  trust  in  Him,  the  Fountain 
of  truth,  the  Light  by  which  we  see  light. 

"For  of  Him,  and  through  Him  and  unto 
Him,  are  all  things.  To  Him  be  the  glory 
forever.     Amen." 


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IMIIII  ifii   Semi"ary-Speer 


J°12  01015  3460 


